ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1602181
The Impact of Unfairness Experience on Cooperative Behavior Revealed by Ultimatum Game-Public Goods Game Integration: An ERPs Study
Provisionally accepted
Yu-Jie Wang1*
Yao-Zhong Liu2- 1Guangdong Industry Polytechnic University, Guangzhou, China
- 2Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
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Fairness critically shapes cooperative behavior in social dilemmas, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms linking unfairness experiences to cooperation remain underexplored. Twenty-four participants (Mage = 19.50 years, SD =1.06) completed the Ultimatum Game (UG) with three proposal types (fair, moderately unfair, and extremely unfair) while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, followed by the Public Goods Game (PGG) to assess cooperation. Behavioral results revealed that participants exhibited robust inequity aversion, rejecting moderately and extremely unfair UG proposals at significantly higher rates than fair one. Exposure to unfairness reduced subsequent PGG contributions, underscoring fairness as a priority over material gains. ERPs results showed that unfair proposals elicited stronger medial frontal negativity (MFN), reflecting norm violation detection, while fair proposals evoked larger P300 amplitudes, indexing reward valuation. Exploratory analyses revealed that P300 amplitudes positively related to cooperative behavior, suggesting reward-related neural activity facilitates post-inequity cooperation. These findings elucidate behavioral patterns of inequity aversion in interactive games and their neurophysiological correlates, advancing the understanding of how fairness preferences regulate cooperative decisionmaking.
Keywords: inequity aversion, cooperation, fairness, social decision-making, Event-related potentials
Received: 29 Mar 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yu-Jie Wang, Guangdong Industry Polytechnic University, Guangzhou, China
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