Advantageous and disadvantageous inequality aversion can be taught through learning of others' preferences.

ABSTRACT: While enforcing egalitarian social norms is critical for human society, punishing social norm violators often incurs a cost to the self. This cost looms even larger when one can benefit from an unequal distribution of resources, a phenomenon known as advantageous inequity-for example, receiving a higher salary than a colleague with the identical role. In the Ultimatum Game, a classic testbed for fairness norm enforcement, individuals rarely reject (or punish) such unequal proposed divisions of resources because doing so entails a sacrifice of one's own benefit. Recent work has demonstrated that observing and implementing another's punitive responses to unfairness can efficiently alter the punitive preferences of an observer. It remains an open question, however, whether such contagion is p

SUBMITTER: Zhang S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12698084 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature