The Timing Of Brain Activity Valuing The Perception Of Opportunity Equality In Non-competitive Context

Equality and justice is an inherent requirement of socialism with Chinese characteristics,and it is also a significant preference of people in social interactions.Previous studies have shown that in the face of other people’s violations of equality standards,people generally choose to refuse,and even willing to sacrifice their own interests to punish the other party or compensate those who have been treated unfairly.Social equality includes two dimensions: opportunity equality and outcome equality.Human history has proved that human society has never stopped chasing opportunity equality,such as women’s suffrage and black affirmative rights movements.Previous studies have also proved that fairness of opportunity is beneficial to personal income,education and subjective happiness.Therefore,it is of great significance for building a prosperous,democratic,civilized,harmonious,and beautiful modern socialist country.However,previous studies mainly focused on outcome equality,and less on opportunity equality.Although a recent study used functional magnetic resonance imaging(f MRI)to explore the neural basis of opportunity equality,due to the relatively low time resolution of f MRI,the temporal characteristics of brain activity behind the opportunity equality have not been revealed yet.Therefore,this study will use event-related potentials(ERPs)with high time resolution to explore this issue.In this study,a total of two experiments were included,both of which used adapted two-person choice game and used event-related potentials(ERPs)to measure the ERP characteristics of opportunity equality in non-competitive situations.Experiment 1sets up three combinations of opportunities to constitute opportunity equality(the number of opportunities for subjects is the same as others,hereinafter referred to as OE),and advantage opportunity equality(more opportunities for subjects than others,hereinafter referred to as AOI)And disadvantaged opportunity equality(the number of subjects is less than others,hereinafter referred to as DOI)three kinds of opportunity conditions,and the establishment of a non-competitive situation was by setting the game rule of “whoever turns the face win”,measured ERP responses under participants passively watched different opportunities conditions in a non-competitive situation,and their feelings afterwards.Since the number of opportunities of the subjects in each trial in Experiment 1 will change,this change may affect the research conclusion of Experiment 1.Therefore,on the basis of experiment 1,we improved the experimental design and carried out experiment 2.Experiment 2 includes experiment2 a,experiment 2b,and experiment 2c.Experiment 2a is a questionnaire collection,Experiment 2b is a behavioral experiment,and Experiment 2c is an ERP experiment.In experiments 2a and 2b,we continued to explore the possible impact of changes in the number of opportunities.In order to eliminate the interference of this additional factor and better detect the cognitive process of opportunity equality itself,Experiment 2c further simplified the experimental design,so that the number of opportunities for the subjects in each trial was kept constant.The three sub-experiments also include three opportunity equality conditions.Experiment 2a and 2b set the game rules to create a non-competitive situation for subjects and game partners who turn 6-10 to win,and 1-5 to lose.Experiment 2c created a non-competitive situation by setting the rules of the game for the participant and game partner whoever turned 4/5/6 to win,and 1/2/3 to lose.In general,the results of Experiment 1 are as follows: 1)Compared with the AOI and DOI conditions,the subjects feel fairer under the OE conditions;compared to the DOI,the subjects feel fairer under the AOI and OE conditions.Delightful.2)On the cognitive level,in the 400-600 ms time window,the P3 amplitude induced by AOI at the Cz electrode is higher than the DOI.Because the design of Experiment 1 is too complicated,the ERP results may be affected by other factors.In order to exclude additional factors and get more pure results,the experiment design is simplified and Experiment 2 is carried out for further exploration.The results of Experiment 2 show that 1)The behavioral level is the same as Experiment 1.Compared with AOI and DOI conditions,subjects feel fairer under OE conditions;compared to DOI,subjects feel more fair under OE conditions Delightful.2)At the cognitive level,the subjects paid less attention to AOI first,and the P1 amplitude induced under AOI conditions was smaller than OE and DOI conditions;secondly,the attention distribution and positive preferences under AOI and OE conditions were more,AOI and The OE condition induces a greater early posterior negative wave(EPN)amplitude than the DOI condition.Finally,under the DOI condition,because the subjects increased the mental effort of fine processing,the DOI condition induced a greater late positive potential(LPP)amplitude than the AOI and OE conditions.In summary,the two experiments jointly clarified the cognitive mechanism and time characteristics valuing the perception of opportunity equality in non-competitive context.1)People’s processing of opportunity equality is based on their own interests.They only dislike the unfairness of unfavorable opportunities,and their actions to maintain fairness are not intuitive,but after considering their own interests.Unlike outcome equality,which focuses on outcome,opportunity equality may mainly focus on the relationship between opportunities and self-interest,because opportunities themselves do not bring immediate benefits,but may represent future benefits.2)The perception of opportunity equality has its own unique processing mechanism.In the early stage,people will first pay attention to relatively more negative stimuli due to the instinctive reaction to avoid risks,and maintain a high level of vigilance against negative stimuli.In the mid-stage,people began to focus on whether they might lose benefits to whether they might gain benefits.In the late stage,people will make greater psychological efforts and detailed processing in order to achieve the purpose of managing emotions and balancing conflicts under the conditions of unfavorable opportunities and unfairness.