Influence of empathic concern on fairness-related decision making: Evidence from ERP

doi:10.3724/SP.J.1041.2022.00385

Abstract

Abstract:

Using event-related potential (ERP) and ultimatum game (UG), this study investigated the influence of empathic concern on fairness-related decision making. The experiment adopted a 2 (state empathic concern: empathy vs. non-empathy) × 3 (fairness: fair vs. disadvantageous unfair vs. advantageous unfair) within-subject design. A total of 37 participants participated in the experiment, and they were asked to choose whether to accept offers from different proposers as responders. Behavior results showed that the acceptance rate of empathy condition was higher than that of non-empathy condition for disadvantageous unfair offers, and the opposite result was observed for advantageous unfair offers. ERP results revealed that for disadvantageous unfair offers, the non-empathy condition elicited a more negative-going anterior N1 (AN1) than the empathy condition, and the empathy condition elicited a larger P2 amplitude than the non-empathy condition. In the empathy context, the disadvantageous unfair condition elicited more negative-going medial frontal negativity (MFN) than the advantageous unfair and fair condition. P3 of fair condition was larger than that of disadvantageous unfair condition, which was not modulated by empathy. These results indicated that empathy modulated not only fairness-related decision making behavior, but also early attention and motivation as well as later cognitive and emotional processing in fairness. However, the higher cognitive processes characterized by P3 were only modulated by fairness but not affected by empathy.

Key words: fairness-related decision making, empathic concern, AN1, P2, MFN

HE Yijuan, HU Xinmu, MAI Xiaoqin. (2022). Influence of empathic concern on fairness-related decision making: Evidence from ERP. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 54(4), 385-397.

Figures/Tables 5

Figure 1. Illustration of a single trial of the multi-round one-shot UG task.

Figure 2. Histogram of interaction effect between empathy and fairness on ARs (A), emotion ratings (range from 1~9) (B) and fairness perception (range from 1~7) (C). Unfair-D means disadvantageous unfair. Unfair-A means advantageous unfair.
Note. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean (SEM); ^*p < 0.05, ^**p < 0.01, ^***p < 0.001.

Figure 3. (A)The Grand-average ERP waveforms from Fz electrode sites for the 3 fairness conditions, respectively; (B) Histogram of interaction effect between empathy and fairness on AN1 and P2. Unfair-D means disadvantageous unfair. Unfair-A means advantageous unfair.
Note. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean (SEM);^†p < 0.1, ^*p < 0.01.

Figure 4. The Grand-average ERP waveforms from Fz(A) and Pz(B) sites for empathy and non-empathy condition, respectively; (C) Histogram of interaction effect between empathy and fairness on MFN and P3.Unfair-D means disadvantageous unfair. Unfair-A means advantageous unfair.
Note. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean (SEM); ^†p < 0.1, ^**p < 0.01.

Figure 5. Grand-average waveforms of PCA-P2 (A) and PCA-MFN (B) at the Fz electrode site and PCA-P3 (C) at the Pz electrode site. Unfair-D means disadvantageous unfair. Unfair-A means advantageous unfair.

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