Fabre, E. F. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2021

Investigating the Impact of Offer Frame Manipulations On Responders Playing The Ultimatum Game

The present study was designed to test the impact of frame manipulations on the decision-making of responders playing the ultimatum game. Experiment 1 investigated responders event-related potentials (ERPs) measured in response to the offers as a function of the frame (i.e., negative: "the proposer keeps" versus positive "the proposer offers"). While no difference in acceptation rate was found as a function of the offers frame, electrophysiological results suggest that the stronger negative affective response to the offers in the negative frame (N400) was successfully reappraised by the responders (P600), possibly explaining why the offer frame manipulation did not modulate acceptation rates. No framing effect was found when the ultimatum game was played in its one-shot version (Experiment 2), suggesting that repeated measurements did not affect responders behavior. However, an offer framing effect was found in female (but not in male) responders, when the players cognitive charge was increased using more complex game rules (Experiment 3), presumably reflecting womens greater affective responses to negative outcomes. Taken together, these results suggest that framing manipulations are associated with complex affective and cognitive processes, supporting the cognitive-affective tradeoff model.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

The Dilemma Of Disobedience: An ERP study

The present experiment aimed at investigating the decision-making and the associated event-related potentials (ERPs) of subordinates under hierarchical pressure. Participants (N = 33) acted as UAV operators and had to decide to crash their defective drone either on a civilian site killing all civilians present on the site or on a military site destroying military material but preventing any human losses. While in the no-command condition, participants decided according to their own preferences, in the command condition they were ordered to protect the military material at the expense of civilians for undisclosed strategic reasons. The results revealed that in the no-command condition participants almost always crashed the drone on the military site (96%), whereas in the command condition they chose to obey orders and sacrifice civilians to protect the military material 33% of the time. In the command condition, participants were longer to make their decisions, mobilizing greater attentional and cognitive resources (i.e., greater P300 responses) to resolve the conflict between their internal moral values and the orders they were given (i.e., greater N200 responses) than in the no-command condition, where they automatically applied the "you shall not kill" rule. Participants also showed a greater negative affective response (i.e., greater P260 amplitudes) after choosing to disobey than to obey orders. This result suggests that disobeying authority could be perceived as a greater moral violation than obeying and sacrificing civilians, suggesting that individuals may sometimes choose to obey malevolent authority to avoid the negative affective reaction triggered by disobedience.

neuroscience↗