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

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that individuals can quickly learn and adopt preferences against advantageous inequality by observing others' punitive responses, highlighting a mechanism for enhancing social norm enforcement.

Contribution

It provides the first evidence that advantageous inequity aversion can be learned vicariously, expanding understanding of social norm transmission mechanisms.

Findings

Participants acquired advantageous inequity aversion through observation.

A model learning the latent preferences best explained the behavior.

Vicarious learning can enhance norm enforcement against inequality.

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 (i.e. advantageous inequity), as in receiving a higher salary than a colleague with the identical role. In the Ultimatum Game, a classic test bed for fairness norm enforcement, individuals rarely reject (punish) such unequal proposed divisions of resources because doing so entails a sacrifice of one's own benefit. Recent work has demonstrated that observing 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 powerful enough to impart advantageous inequity aversion to individuals. Using a variant of the Ultimatum Game in which participants are tasked with responding to fairness violations on behalf of another 'Teacher' - whose aversion to advantageous (versus disadvantageous) inequity was systematically manipulated-we probe whether individuals subsequently increase their punishment unfair after experiencing fairness violations on their own behalf. In two experiments, we found individuals can acquire aversion to advantageous inequity 'vicariously' through observing (and implementing) the Teacher's preferences. Computationally, these learning effects were best characterized by a model which learns the latent structure of the Teacher's preferences, rather than a simple Reinforcement Learning account. In summary, our study is the first to demonstrate that people can swiftly and readily acquire another's preferences for advantageous inequity, suggesting in turn that behavioral contagion may be one promising mechanism through which social norm enforcement - which people rarely implement in the case of advantageous inequality - can be enhanced.