Punishing the privileged: Selfish offers from high-status allocators elicit greater punishment from third-party arbitrators.

ABSTRACT: Individuals high in socioeconomic status (SES) are often viewed as valuable members of society. However, the appeal of high-SES people exists in tension with our aversion to inequity. Little experimental work has directly examined how people rectify inequitable distributions between two individuals varying in SES. The objective of the present study was to examine how disinterested third parties adjudicate inequity in the context of concrete financial allocations between a selfish allocator and a recipient who was the victim of the allocator's selfish offer. Specifically, this study focused on whether knowing the SES of the victim or the allocator affected the participant's decisions to punish the selfish allocator. In two experiments (N = 999), participants completed a modified third-party

SUBMITTER: Mattan BD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7224526 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature