We introduce the Conceal or Reveal Dilemma, in which individuals receive unfair benefits, and must decide whether to conceal or to reveal this unfair advantage. This dilemma has two important characteristics: it does not lend itself easily to cost-benefit analysis, neither to the application of any strong universal norm. As a consequence, it is ideally suited to the study of interindividual and...

Humans bargaining over money tend to reject unfair offers, whilst chimpanzees bargaining over primary rewards of food do not show this same motivation to reject. Whether such reciprocal fairness represents a predominantly human motivation has generated considerable recent interest. We induced either moderate or severe thirst in humans using intravenous saline, and examined responses to unfairne...

This research examines the moderating roles of self-esteem level and self-esteem instability in the relationship between perceived unfair treatment and depressive mood. Based on the assumption that unfairness is a threat to one's social standing and self-esteem, the authors proposed that individuals with highly fragile self-esteem (i.e., the combination of unstable and high self-esteem) react m...

Prior research on the impact of Afrocentric features on health has focused primarily on a single feature, skin color. We explored the effects of two other Afrocentric features (lip thickness, nose width) on Blacks' health status and whether unfair treatment mediates any relationship between these features and health. A secondary analysis of a prior study of Black patients' health was conducted....

Fairness violations elicit powerful behavioral and affective responses. Indeed, people are willing to incur costs to sanction unfair behavior. Here we study the possible impact of long-term mental training in socio-affective capacities such as compassion on altruistic punishment and compensatory behavior in economic games. To this end we recruited a group of long-term meditation practitioners (...

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that is highly characterized by social cognitive impairments. Most studies investigating these impairments focus on one specific social domain such as emotion recognition. However, in daily life, processing complex social situations relies on the combination of several social cognitive and affective processes simultaneously rather than one process alone...

We demonstrate that people can adopt a favorable view of ambiguous risks – contrary to the usual attitude of ambiguity aversion – when doing so permits justification for unfair behavior. We use simple binary dictator games in which one participant in a pair chooses between two allocation options for herself and an anonymous recipient. The “fair” option gives both participants relatively equal a...

Reputation systems have become more and more important in facilitating transactions in online systems. However, the accuracy of reputation systems has always been a concern for the users due to the existence of unfair ratings. Though many approaches have been proposed to mitigate the adverse effect of unfair ratings, most of them use the credibility of the rating provider alone to decide whethe...

Chronic discrimination in both minority and non-minority populations is linked to adverse health outcomes, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease and increased mortality, but the biological processes through which discrimination affects health are unclear. The current study tested the hypothesis that discrimination in a sample of Caucasians would predict elevated serum levels of E-s...

Fairness is a key concept in social interactions and is influenced by intentionality considerations. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the neural correlates of fairness by focusing on responder behavior to unfair offers in an Ultimatum Game paradigm with conditions that differed in their intentionality constraints. Brain activity underlying rejection vs accept...