How Traders' Appearances and Moral Descriptions Influence Receivers' Choices in the Ultimatum Game

Abstract

This work reports on a series of experiments involving 960 participants (aged between 20-30 years and equally balanced by gender), asked to play the receiver role in a modified version of the Ultimatum Game, where together with information on the offer's fairness (e.g. 40 (fair) vs 10 (unfair) of 100 euros), a photo depicted the trader's appearance (trustworthy vs. untrustworthy) and a text provided his moral description (honest vs. dishonest). Receivers were asked to motivate their decision in connection with the appearance, moral judgment, and fairness of the offer, and report on how these variables affected their emotional feelings. Data analysis shows that, in all conditions containing a fair offer, the trader's appearance plays a significant role in the receivers' decisions in terms of acceptance rate. Moral descriptions play a significant role only in conditions containing an unfair offer. However, when asked to motivate their choices, subjects do not feel the interference of the social appearance, rather they provide more or less equal number of motivations with reference to the amount of offers and moral judgments. As for the emotions driving their decisions, non-converging feelings are observed both at intra and inter group level. © 2017 IEEE.