Social value orientation moderates the effects of intuition versus reflection on responses to unfair ultimatum offers

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

Authors

Affiliations

Maik Bieleke

Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Germany

Peter M. Gollwitzer

Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Germany
Department of Psychology, New York University, USA

Gabriele Oettingen

Department of Psychology, New York University, USA
Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Germany

Urs Fischbacher

Department of Economics, University of Konstanz, Germany
Thurgau Institute of Economics, Switzerland

Abstract

We investigated whether social value orientation (SVO) moderates the effects of intuitive versus reflective information processing on responses to unfair offers. We measured SVO one week prior to an ultimatum game experiment in which participants had to accept or reject a series of 10 ultimatum offers including very low (unfair) ones. Before making these decisions, participants mentally contrasted their individual goals with the obstacle of pondering at length or acting in a hasty way; then they made the plan to adopt an intuitive or a reflective mode of processing (intuitive and reflective condition, respectively), or made no such plans (control condition). Participants with rather high (prosocial) SVO scores were more likely to accept unfair offers in the reflective than the intuitive condition. This effect also evinced for a subset of selfish individuals; however, the majority with rather low (selfish) scores made similar decisions in both conditions. This pattern of results suggests that SVO moderates the effects of intuitive versus reflective modes of processing on responses to low ultimatum offers.

Keywords

ultimatum game, social value orientation (SVO), dual-process models, fairness, intuition versus reflection

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