Large-scale community study reveals information sampling drives fairness decisions.

ABSTRACT: Fairness is a fundamental social norm guiding human decision-making. Yet, much of our empirical understanding of fairness derives from controlled laboratory studies with homogeneous student samples, raising concerns about the ecological validity of experimental findings. Here, we tackle this challenge by introducing a citizen science, lab-in-the-field approach, embedding a classic fairness paradigm, the Ultimatum Game (UG), in a well-visited public space within a community: a museum. Over the course of 13 months, we recorded >18,672 decisions from a heterogeneous sample of volunteer members of the public. Each participant responded to four allocation offers from anonymous proposers (two generous, two selfish), with the option to view proposers' past behaviour (previously generous vs. selfi

SUBMITTER: Vahed S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12660913 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature