The Bribery Behavior Pattern And Its Neural Mechanism In Unsupervised Third-Party Decision-Making Tasks

Fairness,that people should get or be entitled to certain resources or treatment,is a fundamental concept of the ethical cognitive dimension.In addition,bribery related to unfairness in society has a rapid development momentum in our country.It not only endangers and undermines the authority and effective implementation of the law but also undermines the economic foundation of country’s socialism and harms the country’s social status.At present,there are few types of research exploring fairness and bribery behavior in laboratory situations.This study uses three experiments to explore the behavioral characteristics and neural mechanisms of third-party individuals’ bribery behavior in unsupervised situations.Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 aimed to explore the patterns of bribery behavior of thirdparty individuals in unsupervised situations at the behavioral level.The subjects were required to complete the task,played the role of player C,the referee.The referee can rule on a winner based on two players’ performance and trading points,and the trading points paid by the winner would be transferred to the referee.The sum of the final trading points is given to the participants as an additional bonus.It turns out that individuals with more unfair behavioral decisions,that is,individuals with a higher probability of accepting bribes,have significantly increased response time when refusing to accept bribes and require more processing time than accepting bribes.In contrast,individuals with fair behavioral decision-making,that is,lowbribery subjects,require more processing time when accepting bribes,but the difference is not statistically significant.Experiment 2 added a self-evaluation task based on Experiment 1.The experiment aims to further explore whether when the subjects have a chance to take bribes,will they be affected by fair self-assessment and reduce bribery? In order to reveal the effect of fairness on the awakening and supervision of moral sense.The results of experiment two further validated the results of experiment one,and found that when the high-bribery group refused to accept bribes,they needed more reaction time,while the low-bribery group did not react significantly in the accepted and rejected condition comparation.The statistical results of self-decision fairness show that after increasing subjective self-assessment,the average probability of taking bribes decreased,but this did not reach the statistical level,and the probability of accepting bribes is positively correlated with the self-evaluation score of fairness.Experiment 3 is based on Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 using f MRI scanning to further the neural mechanism of subjects’ fair decision-making and bribery behavior in unsupervised third-party referee tasks.Each participant completed three parts of the task in the f MRI.First,add a pure sensory decision-making as task one.This task is to exclude whether the participant chooses winner only based on the area of the left and right color patches.Task two and task three correspond to behavior experiment one and experiment two.It should be noted that although the increase in fairness self-evaluation in Experiment 2did not reach a statistically significant level of reducing the probability of bribery,it tends to reduce the probability of bribery.This may be because,in Experiment 2,the frequency of selfevaluation was every ten trials.Thus,in the follow-up f MRI experiment,this has been improved,and the frequency of self-evaluation has been modified to conduct the evaluation after each trial.Similarly,for participants in the low bribery group,accepting bribes takes more time than refusing to accept bribes.On the contrary,the high bribery group took more time to refuse to accept bribes than to accept bribes.Neural data show that the high-bribery group has seen an increase in brain region activation in the right-back frontal prefrontal cortex(DLPFC)compared to accepting and not taking bribes,while the DLPFC and information integration and its context specificity are relevant,indicating that the decision-making process of the high-bribery group includes complex trade-offs of current information to maximize profit.For the low-bribery group,the activities in the joint area of the top and the cortical layer when accepting bribes are inhibited,and a large number of studies show that the joint area of the top is related to mentalization,indicating that the low-bribery individuals need to suppress speculation about the psychological state of others when accepting bribes.