Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Apr 29;11(5):572.
doi: 10.3390/brainsci11050572.

Expect the Worst! Expectations and Social Interactive Decision Making

Affiliations

Expect the Worst! Expectations and Social Interactive Decision Making

Cinzia Giorgetta et al. Brain Sci. .

Abstract

Psychological studies have demonstrated that expectations can have substantial effects on choice behavior, although the role of expectations on social decision making in particular has been relatively unexplored. To broaden our knowledge, we examined the role of expectations on decision making when interacting with new game partners and then also in a subsequent interaction with the same partners. To perform this, 38 participants played an Ultimatum Game (UG) in the role of responders and were primed to expect to play with two different groups of proposers, either those that were relatively fair (a tendency to propose an equal split-the high expectation condition) or unfair (with a history of offering unequal splits-the low expectation condition). After playing these 40 UG rounds, they then played 40 Dictator Games (DG) as allocator with the same set of partners. The results showed that expectations affect UG decisions, with a greater proportion of unfair offers rejected from the high as compared to the low expectation group, suggesting that players utilize specific expectations of social interaction as a behavioral reference point. Importantly, this was evident within subjects. Interestingly, we also demonstrated that these expectation effects carried over to the subsequent DG. Participants allocated more money to the recipients of the high expectation group as well to those who made equal offers and, in particular, when the latter were expected to behave unfairly, suggesting that people tend to forgive negative violations and appreciate and reward positive violations. Therefore, both the expectations of others' behavior and their violations play an important role in subsequent allocation decisions. Together, these two studies extend our knowledge of the role of expectations in social decision making.

Keywords: Dictator Game; Ultimatum Game; expectations; social decision-making.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Experimental design.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Ultimatum Game task.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Dictator Game task.
Figure 4
Figure 4
(a) Average of rejection rates for unfair and fair offer sets respectively. (b) Average of rejection rates for all offers. Line bars indicate, in both graphs, standard errors of the average of rejection rates. * p value = 0.05, ** p value = 0.02.
Figure 5
Figure 5
(a) Average amount of money the participants allocated only to the correctly remembered trials. (b) Average amount of money allocated in all DG trials, as a function of remembered offers and expectation. Line bars indicate the standard errors of the mean (of money allocated).
Figure 6
Figure 6
The percentage of correctly remembered proposers and the average amount of money allocated during the DG to recipients when they (proposers/recipients) matched and did not match prior high and low expectations are reported, respectively, on the left and right panels. Line bars indicate respectively: (a) standard errors of average of correctly remembered proposers, (b) standard errors of average of the money allocated. * p value = 0.001.

References

    1. Loewenstein G.F., Thompson L., Bazerman M.H. Social utility and decision making in interpersonal contexts. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 1989;57:426–441. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.57.3.426. - DOI
    1. Blount S. When social outcomes aren’t fair: The effect of causal attributions on preferences. Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 1995;63:131–144. doi: 10.1006/obhd.1995.1068. - DOI
    1. De Panfilis C., Schito G., Generali I., Gozzi L., Ossola P., Marchesi C., Grecucci A. Emotions at the border: Increased punishment behavior during fair interpersonal exchanges in Borderline Personality Disorder. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 2019;128:162–172. doi: 10.1037/abn0000404. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Grecucci A., Giorgetta C., Bonini N., Sanfey A. Living emotions, avoiding emotions: Behavioral investigation of the regulation of socially driven emotions. Front. Psychol. 2013;3:616. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00616. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Grecucci A., Giorgetta C., Bonini N., Sanfey A.G. Reappraising social emotions: The role of inferior frontal gyrus, temporo-parietal junction and insula in interpersonal regulation. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 2013;7:523. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00523. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources