Emotion in the Ultimatum Game
Sources:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3507
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/300/5626/1755.abstract
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/emo/7/4/876/
A few weeks ago, the web-comic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, or SMBC, posted a comic about the Ultimatum Game. A hypothetical situation used by psychologists to gauge decision making. The game is set up as such: there are two people and 100 dollars. One person makes an offer for a way to split the money. The other person can then either accept or reject the proposal. If they accept it, the money is split accordingly, if they don’t, everybody gets nothing. So, if both players were rational, it would make sense that person 1 would offer player 2 as little as possible, and player 2 would accept because it’s better than nothing. However, this doesn’t happen because humans aren’t always rational.
I then found a study in which they studied the effects of incidental emotion on decision biases, specifically in the ultimatum game. They found that people were shown sad movie clips were less likely to accept unfair offers. They found that amusement had no real effect on their decision making. Their findings suggest that emotion, specifically sadness, can bias decision making in a negative way. Unimpressed with these seemingly trivial findings, I found an article in science magazine that looked for a neural basis for these results. They found that particular areas of the brain are activated when given an unfair offer. Usually, rejections coincide with activation of areas connected to anger or sadness, and other strong emotions. Thus they corroborated that emotion plays an important role in decision making, and in these cases, lead people to make suboptimal decisions in what should be a simple game.