Abstract
Studies show that people would rather sacrifice their own interests in the ultimatum game to persist in fairness, which indicates that fairness preference is a phenomenon for hunman beings. In recent years, the topic of neural electrophysiology mechanism about fairness preference has become the hotspot within current researches. Researchers mainly adopt the method of ultimatum game, and then explore neural electrophysiological mechanism of fairness preference from the perspective of event-related potential, skin conductance response, heart rate etc. Thus current paper gave a review of the nerve electrophysiology mechanism about fairness preference. Based on this review, several suggestions regarding to the direction for future research were given.
The ultimatum game (UG) is a well-studied game used extensively by researchers to study fairness preference. In this game, two players are given an opportunity to split a sum of money. One player (i.e., the proposer) decides how to divide up the money between him- or herself and another player (i.e., the responder). If the responder accepts, the split takes place as proposed; however, if the responder rejects, neither of the two individuals receives any money. Researches about the event-related potential of fairness preference have shown that the feedback-related negativity activation intensity is greater when people are in unfair offers compared with the fair offers; P300 for fair offers has more positive response compared with the unfair offers. Skin conductance response about fairness preference has showed that a significantly higher skin conductance response for unfair offers compared to responses for fair o?er, suggests that participants experienced more emotional arousal when confronted with an unfair o?er as compared to a fair offer. What’s more, heart rate studies about fairness preference have showed that unfair offers were accompanied by cardiac deceleration, as compared with fair offers, which indicates that cardiac deceleration can predicate the rejection of an offer.
At present, researches about the brain imaging with fairness preference and nerve electrophysiology have achieved fruitful results but there are still some deficiencies. Therefore based on these deficiencies future researches will be explored from the following aspects. First of all, the future researches can be integrated the brain imaging with nerve electrophysiology. For instance, the participants are measured from the aspect of the brain electrical, skin conductance response and heart rate at the same time in the ultimatum game. Secondly, researchers should integrate brain imaging and the nerve electrophysiology. At last, the fact that the studies about fairness preference mainly adopt the ultimatum game paradigm or its variant limits the research theme and research content to some extent, which means that the research paradigm of nerve electrophysiology should be expanded in the future research. Nerve electrophysiology researches about fairness preference are the cross-discipline between sociology and neuroscience. Therefore, the discussion on the nerve electrophysiology mechanism is beneficial to extend and expand fairness preference research and deepen people's comprehensive understanding of its nature.
Key words
fairness preference /
event-related potential /
skin conductance responses /
heart rate /
ultimatum game
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Electrophysiology of Fairness Preference:Evidence from ERP、SCR and HR[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2020, 43(1): 180-186
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