## 1. Ultimatum Games and Fairness


Ultimatum games have the following setup. Call one person the
"offerer" and the other the "responder", The
offerer is informed that she can allocate a certain amount of a good.
Suppose the good is money, such as $10, since that is the usual good
chosen by experimenters in the literature. Next the offerer is
instructed to make some offer to the responder--in our example,
the offer could range between $0 and $10, inclusive. So the offerer
can give away all the money, none of it, or something in-between. The
only other piece of information that the offerer knows, standardly, is
that the responder's reaction matters when he is presented with
her offer. If the responder accepts the offer, then both parties keep
whatever the offer says (unless it is $0, in which case only one side
keeps any money). But if the responder rejects the offer, then neither
side gets any money at all, and the game is done. Hence if the offer
is to keep $8 and give $2, and the responder accepts this offer, then
that is in fact the amount of money with which each side walks
away. But if the responder rejects the offer, then each side walks
away with $0.


 A couple of observations are important here. First, it is not
essential to the game that the offerer know anything about the
responder--he or she could be a complete stranger. Second and, as
we will see, very importantly, it is not an essential feature of the
game that the responder know how much money the offerer has to work
with in the first place. So when the offer comes in at $2, the
responder might have no idea whether that is all the money that the
offerer has to allocate, or whether it is just a small amount out of
$100, $10,000, or even higher. In many versions of the ultimatum
game, the responder *is* told what the offerer has
available. But the point to stress here is that this is an optional
feature of the game. Finally, it is worth noting that the power
dynamic in this game favors the offerer. The responder cannot make any
counteroffers back in the hope of getting a bigger offer. He only has
the threat of veto power. But if he does veto the offer, then he comes
away with nothing himself. That is not a great negotiating position to
be in.


Given this last thought, a natural prediction to make about how
ultimatum games will go is the following. Offerers will want to
maximize their self-interest, and so maximize their take-home payment.
They might think that, from a responder's perspective, any money
is better than no money. So we might predict that the offer itself
will be as low as possible, say 1 cent or 5 cents in our example
involving $10. For the responder to reject this offer would be
irrational, since he would come away with nothing, whereas accepting
the offer would make him better off than he would otherwise have
been.


This is, indeed, what many economists in the early days of research
on the ultimatum game predicted would happen, on the basis of standard
game theoretic assumptions (Kahneman et al. 1986: S285-286;
Pillutla and Murnighan 1995: 1409; Guth 1995: 329; Camerer and Thaler 1995: 210). In other words,
given a concern to promote one's own self-interest, the
prediction is that minimal offers will be made in ultimatum games to
maximize one's take-home amount--which is the subgame
perfect Nash equilibrium (Kahneman et al. 1986: S289; Forsythe et
al. 1994: 348; Guth 1995: 331; Pillutla and Murnighan 1995: 1409,
2003: 248; Straub and Murnighan 1995: 345-346).


But something surprising happened. Beginning with Werner
Guth's famous paper in 1982 (Guth et al. 1982), the first
empirical studies that were actually conducted to see what people
would do in this situation found a rather different result. Robert
Forsythe and his colleagues, for instance, found that not one offerer
kept the entire amount of $10, and that offers were instead
distributed around the 50/50 split amount with 75% offering at least
an equal amount (1994: 362). As we noted, this behavior by offerers is
not what standard game theory would have predicted. Similarly, in a
well-known paper Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues found that out of
$10, the mean amount offered was $4.76 with 81% making equal split
offers (1986: S291, see also Guth 1995).


Surprising results were found for responders too. Kahneman also
reports, for instance, that the mean of minimally acceptable (i.e.,
not rejected) offers was $2.59, with 58% demanding more than $1.50
(Kahneman et al. 1986: S291).


To explain these puzzling results, several researchers began to
move beyond standard game theoretic assumptions and appeal to a
justice motive. With offerers, this could be a desire to be fair in
allocating goods, together with a belief that the fair allocation in
the game is an equal split. With responders, it could be a desire to
not be treated unfairly. This could lead to different explanations of
rejection behavior, such as a desire to not participate in unfair
deals or a desire to punish someone who is behaving unfairly (Kahneman
et al. 1986: S290, see also Forsythe et al. 1994; Guth et al. 1982;
Guth 1995; Camerer and Thaler 1995). 


But this is not the end of the story about the research done to try
to explain and predict ultimatum game behavior. In the 1990s, a wave
of new studies began to cast doubt on these fairness
explanations. Here are some of the interesting results from this
research:


1. Paul Straub and J. Keith Murnighan (1995) varied the amount of
information given to offerers and responders. Some offerers were told
that responders would know the amount that the offerer had to work
with, while other offerers were told that responders would not have
this piece of information at their disposal when presented with the
offer. If the fairness hypothesis is correct, this change of
information should not matter. The average offer should be roughly the
same in both conditions. But it wasn't. In the scenario where
the starting amount is $10, the mean offer made to responders was
$4.05 in the complete information condition, but $3.14 in the partial
information condition. When the amount was $80, the means were $30.73
and $23.00 respectively (Straub and Murnighan 1995: 353).


A similar disparity emerged when participants were responders, some
of whom were told the amount that the offerer had to work with, and
some of whom were kept in the dark about this. For the ignorant group,
the mean lowest acceptable offer was $1.04, and 29 out of 45
participants accepted an offer of $0.01. For the fully informed $10
group, it was $1.92. For the fully informed $80 group, it was $17.43
(1995: 351-352). This result, though, need not be out of line
with what the fairness models above predict. The troublesome results
for fairness models arise here with respect to the offerers, not the
responders.
2. Madan Pillutla and J. Keith Murnighan (1995) also varied
partial versus complete information for offerers, and again found a
significant difference. When the starting amount to be divided was
$10, the mean offer given partial information was $3.54, whereas for
complete information it was $4.66 (1995: 1415). The two new wrinkles
were (i) whether offers would come with a label "this is
fair" or not, and (ii) whether an independent third party would
evaluate offers and decide if they were fair or not. Pillutla and
Murnighan reasoned that if offerers really were motivated
predominantly by fairness, then these variations should not matter
significantly. But they did. For instance, in the partial information
condition, it was already noted that the mean offer was $3.54, but it
dropped to $2.61 in the fair label variation (1995: 1415). Hence,




>  [t]hey acted as if labeling an offer as fair would
> lead respondents to accept smaller offers--even when the latter
> had complete information. (1995: 1417)
> 
> 


 On the other hand, the mean offer increased all
the way to $4.67 in the third-party label variation, with 72% making
50-50 offers (1995: 1415-1416). These are effects that
are easier to explain given a self-interested motivational story,
than they are on a fairness motivational story. As the researchers
note, "It seems that offerers only made equal offers when it
was worth their while to appear fair" (1995: 1416).


For responders, Pillutla and Murnighan found that again small
offers were rejected much more frequently in complete information
versus partial information conditions. The rejection rate increased
even more when the information was complete and the offer was labeled
as unfair by a third party (1995: 1420).
3. Pillutla and Murnighan (1996) and Terry Boles and his
colleagues (2000) were among several researchers who introduced the
variation of giving outside options to responders, or options which
they knew they would receive if they rejected an offer. For instance,
a responder might reject an offer of $1 if he knows that he has an
outside option of receiving $2 when rejecting an offer. With this new
twist, researchers can then introduce additional conditions in which
offerers know or do not know whether there is an outside option for
responders, or what the value of that offer is, or what the range of
the offer could be, and so forth. Without getting into all the various
permutations, one important result that Boles found was that offerers
made lower offers when they knew the size of the outside option, which
does not seem to be what fairness would predict (Boles et al. 2000:
247). Furthermore, Boles introduced a wrinkle whereby offerers could
send a message with their offer, allowing them to be deceptive about
the size of the allocation they had available to them in partial
information conditions. The game was repeated with the same
participants as offerers and responders for four rounds, and after
each round, any deceit that offerers used was revealed to
responders. It turned out that offerers were deceptive 13.6% of the
time (2000: 247). Boles also discovered that when responders felt
deceived, in the next round they were much more likely to reject a new
offer, even at the expense of their self-interest. In other words,
they wanted to punish the offender for deceiving them (Boles et
al. 2000: 249-250).


Given these results, a diverse array of more sophisticated
motivational accounts has been offered in the recent literature (For
additional results and discussion, see also Roth 1995; Kagel et al.
1996; Pillutla and Murnighan 2003; Camerer 2003; Murnighan and Wang 2016.). One thing they have in common
is that they are egoistic accounts, appealing in some way to what
would advance a person's self-interest. In the case of offerers,
here are some of the motivational proposals that have been made:


1. Larger offers are made due to fear of rejection of smaller offers
(Pillutla and Murnighan 1995: 1410-1411).
2. Larger offers are made so long as one can enjoy appearing to be
fair; otherwise smaller offers are made (Pillutla and Murnighan 1995:
1424; Camerer and Thaler 1995: 212).


In the case of responders, here is an example of a recent egoistic
proposal:



Small offers are rejected because of wounded pride. Although
responders may appeal to considerations of fairness, this only serves
as post-hoc confabulation (Straub and Murnighan 1995: 360-361;
Pillutla and Murnighan 2003: 253-254).


So we can see a trend here (Roth 1995; Pillutla and Murnighan 1995:
1424, 2003: 250). Initial hypotheses about participants in ultimatum
games relied on relatively simple egoistic motives. Those hypotheses
were allegedly disconfirmed by the evidence. New hypotheses were
offered which appealed to the role of fairness motives. But then these
hypotheses also were allegedly disconfirmed by additional evidence. So
even newer hypotheses have now been offered that involve more
elaborate egoistic motives. Future work will have to establish whether
these proposals turn out to be any more plausible in the long run.


## 2. Dictator Games and Fairness


It turns out that this trend is not specific to ultimatum
games--research on dictator games went through the same
evolution. We said that ultimatum games are relatively simple two
person games with an offerer and a responder. In the standard dictator
setup, things are even simpler. Call the two people involved the
"dictator" and the "recipient", Using our $10
example, the dictator is told that she can give any amount between $0
and $10, inclusive, to another person. And whatever the dictator
decides, that is the end of the story. So if the dictator wants to
keep $8 and give $2 to the recipient, then that is what each person
walks away with.


Beginning with the traditional game-theoretic framework, the
prediction for what participants serving as dictators would do is
straightforward--keep all the money (Forsythe et al. 1994: 348;
Dana et al. 2006: 193). Since there is no threat of rejection by the
recipient, and since all that matters is promoting one's
self-interest, there is every reason to keep all of the money. Or so
one might think.


But once again, that is not what most participants actually did. In
the same Forsythe study, while 21% gave nothing to the recipient, the
remaining 79% gave something, with 21% giving an equal amount of the
$10 (Forsythe et al. 1994: 362). Kahneman also ran a version of a
dictator game where students in a psychology course could divide $20
with an anonymous fellow student, or keep $18 for themselves and give
$2 to the other student. Strikingly, 76% choose the even division
(Kahneman et al. 1986: S291). In addition, 74% of participants were
subsequently willing to pay $1 to punish an unfair dictator and in the
process reward a fair one, even though this would reduce their own
monetary payment in the process (1986: S291). Van Dijk and
Vermunt (2000) found that information asymmetries were not as
prevalent as in ultimatum games. Specifically, there wasn't a
significant effect observed based on whether dictators knew that
recipients were aware of the total amount dictators had to
allocate. As they conclude,




>  whereas the dictator game evokes a true concern
> for fairness, allocators in the ultimatum game only appear to behave
> fairly.... (2000: 19; for a review of results in dictator games,
> see Camerer 2003; Murnighan and Wang 2016)
> 
> 
> 


 Overall, according one review of the literature,
giving in dictator games amounts to roughly 15-20% of what a
participant receives in the first place (Camerer 2003: 57-58), which
is less than fair but more than completely self-interested. As a quick
aside, it is worth noting the implicit assumption in much of this
literature that a 50/50 split is the fair distribution, whereas
keeping most of the money for oneself would be considered
unfair. Philosophically this might be a contested matter, and there
could also be some variability in terms of which cultures tend to
accept this assumption more so than others.


If the same trend holds that we saw in the previous section, then
we know to expect that alternative egoistic stories about motivation
in dictator games will have emerged as a result of more recent results
challenging the fairness motivational hypothesis. Here are two
examples of such results:



> 
> a. In the baseline condition of John List's study (2007), both
> people in the dictator game setup were given $5 to start with. Then
> the dictator received another $5 and was given the chance to allocate
> anywhere from $0 to all $5 to the other person. Three additional
> conditions had interesting twists. In the Take ($1) condition, the
> setup was the same including the chance to allocate money, but now
> instead there was an option to take $1 from the other person. The Take
> ($5) condition, as its name suggests, allowed up to $5 to be taken
> from the other person (or $5 allocated, or nothing taken or
> allocated). Finally, in the Earnings condition, everything was the
> same as Take ($5) except the dictator earned the $10 for performing a
> 30-minute task beforehand. Here were the results (List 2007: 487):
> 
> 
> 
> 
> |  |  |  |
> | --- | --- | --- |
> |  | Giving a Positive Amount | Mean Offer |
> | Baseline | 71% | $1.33 |
> | Take ($1) | 35% | $0.33 |
> | Take ($5) | 10% | [?]$2.48 |
> | Earnings | 6% | [?]$1.00 |
> 
> 
> 
> Strikingly, when given the chance to take money from a stranger,
> dictators would less frequently allocate money to the stranger, and
> their average allocation would be smaller. Plus if they felt like they
> earned the money as opposed to just being given it by the
> experimenter, then almost none of the dictators would be willing to
> part with their money, being more inclined to take rather than to
> give.
> 
> 
> b. Jason Dana and his colleagues (2006) had dictators make their
> allocation decision using $10. They were told that recipients would be
> informed about what the dictator knew when making his choice. But
> before recipients actually were told anything, dictators were given
> another choice. They could keep $9 for themselves, $0 would go to the
> recipient, and crucially, the recipient would not learn anything about
> the dictator game at all. This exit option would thereby allow dictators to
> keep a large payoff while also knowing that they had not disappointed
> the recipient. And the dictator would not have to worry about
> appearing selfish by keeping most of the money (Dana et al. 2006:
> 196). Eleven out of 40 dictators (28%) ended up taking this exit option,
> with 2 of them initially planning to keep the $10 (2006: 197). The
> remaining 9 participants had planned on giving some money to the
> recipient, and now did not have to.
> 
> 
> 28%, while an interesting result, is still not that large. The
> majority of participants both did not exit and gave some of the $10 to
> the recipient. However, in a second study, Dana did two things. First
> he replicated the results of his first study, and this time 43% exited
> (2006: 199). But in a new condition, dictators were told at the very
> beginning that recipients would be oblivious to the dictator
> game--they would just receive a note that said, "Thank you
> for your time today. An additional payment of $\_\_ is attached to this
> note" (2006: 198; Dana did not explain what would happen if the
> amount was $0). Thus dictators knew that they could make any offer
> they wanted to without worrying about how it would be viewed by the
> receiver. So they chose their allocation, and then were given the $9
> exit option. And here is the interesting result. Now only 4% of
> participants took the exit option, and 54% chose to give $0 and to not
> exit (2006: 199; see also Dana et al. 2007 for additional related
> studies).
> 
> 
> 


As with ultimatum games, a diverse array of more sophisticated
egoistic motivational explanations have been proposed to account for
the behavior of dictators. Here are examples of a few of them:



A desire to feel good by giving.


A desire to not appear selfish, or to appear to be fair.


A desire to give what others expect one to give (or not to
give).


(for an overview, see Dana et al. 2006: 194-195, 200; Dana et al. 2007: 68-69, 78)



For what it's worth, my view is that it is unlikely any one
of the proposed motives in the ultimatum and dictator literatures is
going to be sufficient by itself to explain the observed patterns of
behavior. Nor, to be fair, are they usually intended by researchers to
be sufficient either. Rather, motives concerned with good (monetary)
outcomes for the self are no doubt part of the story. But so too are
motives concerned with fairness. And so too are one or more additional
egoistic motives, such as not wanting to appear selfish. A complex,
multi-motive model is what is needed going forward (see also Forsythe
et al. 1994: 362; Roth 1995; Guth 1995; Kagel et al. 1996: 102;
Pillutla and Murnighan 2003: 254; Dana et al. 2006: 195; Dana et al. 2007: 78; Murnighan and Wang 2016: 87).


Let me end with a cautious note. Recently there have been some doubts raised about the external validity of dictator games, or the extent to which the results generated in these lab studies carry over to non-artificial or natural settings. For instance, Jeffrey Winking and Nicholas Mizer (2013) had a confederate approach an individual at a bus stop in Las Vegas, and "pretended to notice chips in his pocket, stopped briefly and claimed to the participant that he was late for a ride to the airport and asked the individual if he/she wanted the casino chips, which he did not have time to cash in," and which were worth $20 (2013: 290). Ten feet away with his back turned to the participant was another confederate. The confederate with the chips would also add, "I don't know, you can split it with that guy however you want" while pointing towards the second confederate (2013: 290). However, in stark contrast to the results earlier, here every single participant kept all $20 for themselves (2013: 291). Several writers have claimed that external validity might be limited because the laboratory results for dictator games could be heavily influenced by experimenter demand effects (Zizzo 2010, 2013, Winking and Mizer 2013.


## 3. Batson's Modified Dictator Game and Moral Hypocrisy


For the past twenty years, the psychologist Daniel Batson and his
colleagues have developed a novel experimental approach which closely
resembles the dictator game. Because this approach has been explored
using a number of interesting modifications by the same researcher in
the course of constructing a sophisticated motivational story about
resource allocation, and because his findings have attracted a great
deal of interest and attention, it is worth delving into them in some
detail (For the studies, see Batson et al. 1997, 1999, 2002, 2003. For
reviews, see Batson and Thompson 2001 and Batson 2008. For related
studies and discussion, see Valdesolo and DeSteno 2007, 2008 and
Watson and Sheikh 2008. For Batson's exploration of the implications of this research for moral psychology, see Batson 2015.).


Here is the setup Batson typically used. Participants were told
that they were part of a task assignment study. Individually, they
were given the choice of whether to assign a positive consequences
task or a neutral consequences task to either themselves or another
participant, who (they were told) would simply assume the assignment
was made by chance. The positive consequences task was such that for
each correct response, the participant would receive one ticket for a
raffle with a prize of $30 at the store of his or her choice. In the
neutral consequences task, there would be no consequences for correct
or incorrect responses but, "most participants assigned to the
neutral consequences task find it rather dull and boring"
(Batson et al. 1997: 1339). After making the assignment privately and
anonymously, participants were asked about what was the morally right
way to assign the task consequences, and to rate on a 9-point scale
whether they thought the way they had actually made the task
assignment was morally right.


We can see that one of the differences between Batson's setup
and a typical dictator game is that here the recipient would not know
where the allocation came from, nor that there was another possible
allocation that could have been made to him instead. Now such
information is not an essential feature of dictator games; in fact we
just saw a similar setup in one of Dana's studies. But in the
usual configuration dictators typically know that recipients will know
how they received their allocation.


What ends up happening when participants are placed into this
situation? Well, they tend to assign themselves the positive task. Out
of twenty participants, Batson found (Batson et al. 1997: 1340):




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| Assigned self to positive consequences task |  16 |
| Assigned other to positive consequences task |  4 |


Furthermore, only 1 out of the 16 said that assigning oneself to
the positive task was morally correct. Yet even these 16 participants
rated the morality of their assignment in the middle of the 9-point
scale (4.38), which was significantly lower than the 8.25 rating for
the 4 participants who assigned the other participant to the positive
consequences task (Batson et al. 1997: 1340).


From here Batson performed many additional studies which were
variations of this initial setup. Suppose, for instance, that we make
the moral norm at work here salient to participants just before they
make their assignment by including a statement that,



>  Most participants feel that giving both people an
> equal chance--by, for example, flipping a coin--is the
> fairest way to assign themselves and the other participant to the
> tasks (we have provided a coin for you to flip if you wish). But the
> decision is entirely up to you. (Batson et al. 1997: 1341)
> 
> 
> 


10 participants flipped and 10 did not. 8 out of 10 in the first
group said flipping was the morally right procedure, and 6 out of 10
said so in the second group. Most importantly, Batson found (Batson et
al. 1997: 1342):





|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| Assigned self to positive consequences task out of 10 who did not
flip |  9 |
| Assigned self to positive consequences task out of 10
who *did* flip |  9 |



This second result is grossly out of line with what the random
flipping of a coin would have predicted. At least some of the
participants in the second group must have flipped in a way that went
in favor of the *other* person, but still assigned themselves
the positive task. Self-interest seemed to have crept into their
decision making process in a significant way. Yet, and perhaps most
surprisingly, those who flipped rated what they had done much more
morally right (7.30 on a 1-9 scale) than those who did not flip
(4.00) (Batson et al. 1997: 1341).


Here is another wrinkle--suppose participants are now given
the option to have the experimenter assign them one of the two tasks,
while also knowing what that assignment is going to be ahead of
time. We get the following (Batson et al. 1997: 1343):





|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| Accepted experimenter's assignment
if it would be the positive consequences task | 17 out of 20 |
| Accepted experimenter's assignment if it would be the
neutral consequences task  | 11 out of 20 |
| Remaining participants who assigned themselves to the positive
consequences task (whether flipped or not)  | 12 out of 12 |



So in this experiment, only 22.5% of participants ended up with the
neutral task. Yet for the 17 participants in the first group, on
average they felt they had acted just as morally right (7.06 on a
9-point scale) as the 11 participants in the second group (7.91)
(Batson et al. 1997: 1343).


What these results have suggested to Batson is that most of us (at
least in these kinds of situations) are disposed towards a kind
of *moral hypocrisy*, or appearing to be moral to oneself and
others but avoiding the costs of actually being so if one can (try to)
get away with it. After all, many participants were typically eager to
flip the coin and report after the fact that this was the morally
right course of action, but then distorted the process so that the
results came out in their favor. Note that it is not the mere fact
that they choose the positive consequences task for themselves that is
hypocritical by itself--there could be cases where a person
thinks of acts like this as being in line with her self-interest, and
is not even aware of their moral ramifications. Nor is their hypocrisy
captured here by the additional fact that the participants also seemed
to believe in the moral principle that flipping the coin is the
morally fair way to assign the task consequences. For then we would
just have a perfectly familiar case of weakness of will, in which you
believe that something is right but fail to be sufficiently motivated
to do it. Rather, their hypocrisy arises when they (i) choose the
positive consequences for themselves, while (ii) seeming to believe
that flipping the coin and following what it indicates is morally
correct, *and* (iii) still claiming to themselves and others to
have made the morally right task assignment (For more on
characterizing moral hypocrisy, see Batson et al. 1997:
1335-1336, 1999: 525-526, 2002: 330; Batson and Thompson
2001; and Batson 2008, 2011: 222-224.).


How is it really possible for these participants to pull off this
combination? In particular, it is one thing to appear to be acting
morally to others. But these participants are also appearing to be
moral *to* *themselves* *too*. How are they able
to downplay the costs associated with guilt, regret, and hypocritical
behavior for acting immorally by going against what they know to be
right, and also experience the self-rewards for moral behavior? One
possibility is that the participants in question have come to deny any
moral responsibility in this situation, thereby deactivating the moral
norm. Or perhaps they have come to deny that they are able to carry
out the task, or that they are no longer aware of the likely
consequences of their actions. But there is no evidence to suggest
that these background conditions have failed to apply in these
particular cases (Batson 2008: 57). Another possibility is that these
participants have come to think that their behavior is in line with
their moral standards, thereby allowing them to not feel guilt and to
even perhaps take pride in their behavior. This could be because they
have revised the content of the moral principle to create an exception
clause for this one kind of situation. Or it might be that they lie to
or deceive themselves about what the principle says in the first
place.


But the results already cited above cast doubt on these hypotheses
as well (see in particular Batson et al. 1999: 526; this is not to say
that these hypotheses are not accurate in other cases, but the focus
here is only on understanding the data generated by Batson's
studies). Batson also introduced another variety of the setup whereby
the moral principle is made salient, a coin is provided, and the coin
is clearly marked on one side with "SELF to POS[ITIVE]"
and "OTHER to POS" for the opposite side (Batson et
al. 1999: 527). In those cases when the coin lands on OTHER, it seems
very hard to think, in spite of what the moral principle and the coin
both say, that a person who still assigns himself to the positive
consequences task would take that to be morally
acceptable. Furthermore, only 2 out of 40 participants reported
afterwards that the most morally right thing to do is to assign
themselves to the positive consequences task (Batson et al. 1999:
529). Yet of the 28 who chose to flip, Batson found (Batson et
al. 1999: 528):





|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| Assigned self to positive consequences task | 24 |
| Assigned other to positive consequences task | 4 |



Furthermore, those who assigned themselves to the positive
consequences task after flipping the coin again thought that they were
being highly moral (7.42 on a 9-point scale), while those who made the
same assignment without flipping the coin did not (3.90) (Batson et
al. 1999: 529). So marking the coin and thereby reducing the
ambiguity as to what the fair assignment should have been, did nothing
to undermine moral hypocrisy. We are still without an explanation for
how it seems to work--more on that in a moment.


A natural thought here is that this last result does not
distinguish between those participants who flip, win, and then rate
the morality of their action, versus those who flip, lose, change the
task assignment to favor themselves, and then rate the morality of
their action. It could be that the former group (rightly) rates the
morality of their action highly, since they are following the fair
procedure, whereas the second group rates it low, perhaps around 4.0
as do those who do not even bother flipping the coin and just assign
themselves the positive task. If the results came out this way, then
we would have evidence for moral weakness of will, to be sure, but not
for moral hypocrisy, since the second group would be honest about the
moral failure of their action.


In a later study, Batson tested this possibility using secret
observations of how each participant who flipped ended up having his
or her coin fall (Batson et al. 2002: 334-338). Of the 32 who
flipped the coin, 16 got OTHER to POS or otherwise fiddled the coin
flip so that it came out in their favor (i.e., repeated flipping). For
this group, the mean rated morality of their action was 5.56, which
was significantly higher than the 3.89 for the group which assigned
itself to the positive task without using the coin. On the other hand,
it was also lower than the 7.45 for the group which flipped, won SELF
to POS, and assigned themselves to the positive task (2002: 336). The
upshot is that,



>  even though the coin had no more effect on their
> decision than it had on the decision of those who did not claim to use
> the coin at all, the fiddlers still said they thought the way they
> made the task assignment decision was more moral. Their sham reference
> to use of the coin seems to have provided sufficient appearance of
> morality that they could claim to have acted, if not totally morally,
> at least moderately so. (2002: 337)
> 
> 


To summarize, the studies mentioned above suggest that participants
could have had their relevant fairness norm activated--in this
case, the norm that flipping a coin and conforming to its results is
the morally right way to behave--and even be motivated to some
extent to do so. But this motivation must have been so weak that, once
the cost/benefit analysis was done on an alternative action of
secretly ignoring the coin when it went against the person and instead
assigning oneself to the positive task, it became fairly easy to
outweigh or undercut the motivation to do the right thing. So our
fairness norms look to have little enhancing power after all, or at
least in these kinds of cases.


But all is not lost for fairness norms. Batson was able to discover
two variables which separately helped to ensure that motivation to be
fair did win out. The first variable was the introduction of a
mirror. The setup was as usual with no labeling of the coin, but now a
mirror was propped up against a wall on the only table where
participants could fill out their forms. For one group of
participants, the mirror was facing them; for the other, it was turned
to the wall. This ended up making a significant difference (Batson et
al. 1999: 530):




 Assigned Self to Positive Consequences Task |  |  No Facing Mirror | Facing Mirror |
|  Did Not Flip Coin (29) | 85% | 62% |
|  Flipped Coin (23)  | 85% | 50% |


Here for the first time we see results in line with what fairness
requires--for those who flipped the coin and were facing the
mirror, the overall results were as chance would predict.


What is the best explanation for the contribution made by the
mirror? Batson appeals to research on the psychology of
self-awareness, in which objects like mirrors can,



>  heighten awareness of discrepancies between
> behavior and salient personal standards, creating pressure to act in
> accord with standards. (Batson et al. 1999: 529; for more on the
> psychology of self-awareness, see Wicklund 1975)
> 
> 


 In this case, the mirror served to highlight to the person the
difference between what he believed was morally correct in this
situation, and the opposing temptation to act out of self-interest.
This heightened awareness seemed to either create extra motivation to
comply with the fairness norm or lessen motivation to do the
self-interested thing (or perhaps both). Thus the mirror can be said
to increase the salience of the self's own personal standards of
evaluation (Another hypothesis, though, is that it increases the
salience of standards of social evaluation, i.e., how others might
judge him. Batson tested this possibility and did not find support for
it (2002: 331-334)).


Self-awareness also provides a clue about where to find a plausible
explanation for how moral hypocrisy is possible. That clue has to do
with a particular form of self-deception (Batson et al. 1997: 1336,
1346, 1999: 526-527.). Rather than thinking that participants
simply revised their fairness standards to make their behavior look
acceptable in their own eyes, perhaps instead they were engaging
(often unconsciously) in an act of self-deception whereby they avoided
comparing their behavior to the relevant moral standards. If the two
are kept apart from each other, that mitigates the perceived costs of
not acting fairly while doing nothing to mitigate the perceived
benefits of acting self-interestedly. But with increased
self-awareness, the discrepancy between the fairness norm and the
self-interested option was made especially salient so that it became
psychologically difficult for many participants to employ this
particular form of self-deception (Batson et al. 1999: 527, 529,
531-532, 2002: 331 and Batson and Thompson 2001: 55.).


The other variable which Batson found to increase motivation
associated with the fairness norms had to do with perspective
taking. Take the usual setup, but with the caveat that the default
starting point is for the participant to be awarded two raffle tickets
for every correct response, while the other participant gets zero
tickets. Then the task assignment becomes whether the participant is
willing to change the assignment so that it is symmetrical with both
people receiving one ticket each. For controls, 38% changed the task
consequences to symmetrical. However, for the experimental group, 83%
did (Batson et al. 2003: 1199). The difference? This group was
instructed to adopt the perspective of the other
person--"we would like for you to imagine yourself in the
place of the other participant" (Batson et al. 2003: 1198,
emphasis deleted). This is different from imagining what the other
person is feeling or experiencing--the instructions here are very
much in line with the Biblical mandate to, "Do unto others as
you would have them do unto you" (Matthew 7:12.).


There is one additional implication from Batson's work which
I want to highlight here. Consider again those participants who are
about to flip the coin. At that point before they see what the outcome
is, what is the nature of their motivation? Perhaps for the moment at
least some of them want to do the morally right thing (follow the
dictate of the coin, however it ends up landing) for its own sake. If
the coin lands in their favor, then the outcome also aligns with their
self-interest, which is so much the better. But if it lands in the
other person's favor, then they might see what being fair would
cost them, and their self-interested motives end up outweighing their
initial moral motivation. Or perhaps this is all
fanciful--perhaps when they are flipping the coin, all they want
is what they think is ultimately in their self-interest, which at the
moment is just flipping the coin so as to benefit from appearing to be
moral.


One way to test these hypotheses, Batson reasoned, is to see if
participants cared about whether the flipping of the coin and so the
task assignment was done by themselves or by the experimenter. If the
egoistic hypothesis is correct, then they should want to flip the coin
themselves so that they can rig the outcome. If the other hypothesis
involving an ultimate desire to be moral is correct, however, it
should not matter who flips. When the experiment was actually run with
this choice option, 80% of those who used a coin wanted the
experimenter to flip it. This initial evidence thus favors postulating
a motive to follow the fairness norm (and perhaps moral norms more
generally) for its own sake (Batson and Thompson 2001:
55-56.).


Suppose this hypothesis about motivation is correct. How strong and
psychologically powerful of a force does it typically seem to be in
cases involving fairness? The evidence suggests, at least given the
current state of research, that for many of us it is only weak in
strength. We can already see this from the studies cited above when so
many participants do not actually follow their moral principle about
what is a fair task assignment. In addition, Batson varied the
previous setup so that the assignment was between a positive and
a *negative* task, where the latter involved receiving
"mild but uncomfortable" electric shocks for each
incorrect response. With this change, only 25% of participants
offered to let the experimenter flip the coin, and another 25% flipped
themselves, with 91% choosing the positive task. The remaining 50% of
participants simply bypassed the pretense of the coin flip and gave
themselves the positive task while readily admitting that this was not
morally right (Batson and Thompson 2001: 56.). The implication is that
moral motivation caused by our fairness norms seems to be weak and
highly susceptible to being outweighed in cases of this type where the
person's self-interest is at stake.


## 4. Possible Implications of Batson's Research for the Empirical Reality of the Virtue of Justice


Having reviewed this extensive research project by Batson, one
natural direction some philosophers might go in next is to examine
what it suggests about people's moral character. This is
especially true for philosophers engaged in recent discussions of
situationism and the empirical reality of virtue and vice (Harman
1999, 2000; Doris 1998, 2002; Snow 2010; Miller 2014).


Given the focus of this essay, we will only look at the virtue of
fairness. It seems clear that Batson's results do not inspire
much confidence in this virtue being widely held. For instance,
something like the following seems plausible:



(1)
 A person who is
fair will reliably distribute a good fairly as opposed to selfishly,
especially when he or she believes that this would be the fair thing
to do and the good is relatively small in value.

But time and again in Batson's studies, the participants
rigged things so that they received the better outcome. Admittedly, to
count against (1), we have to assume that this was an unfair
distribution, which may be controversial. But most are likely to grant
that assumption, and the participants themselves did not appear to
believe that what they did was the fair thing.


Similarly, this seems to be true of the virtue of fairness:



(2)
 A person who is fair will not reliably and sincerely claim to
have done the morally correct thing, when he knows that what he did
was unfair and selfish, and the benefit to himself was relatively
small in value.

To clarify, this is not a point about being honest rather than
lying about one's behavior. Rather, the point with this criteria
is that a fair person would likely not be deceived or be of two minds
about the unfairness of his behavior in such instances. He would
clearly recognize and acknowledge that his behavior was unfair. But
again the participants did not tend to live up to this fairness
standard. As we saw, in one study those who flipped and assigned
themselves the positive consequence task rated what they had done as
highly moral (7.30 on a 1 to 9 scale), and their rating was much
higher than for those who assigned themselves to this task without
flipping (4.00) (Batson et al. 1997: 1341).


There are other respects in which participants failed to live up to
the standards of fairness, but the picture is not all bleak. In fact,
there are many ways in which participants did not conform to the
standards of the vice of *unfairness* either. Here is one:



(3)
 An unfair person does not have moral beliefs to the effect that
unfairness is wrong in general, as well as wrong in particular
instances of what are widely considered to be acts of unfairness. Or
if he does happen to have such beliefs, he will not care much about
them and they will not play a significant motivational role in his
psychology.

But we saw that Batson's participants did seem to genuinely
believe that the fair thing to do was to flip the coin and make the
appropriate assignment. True, this belief did not have a significant
motivational role to play in some contexts, but in others it did, such
as when taking the perspective of the other person.


This suggests another respect in which most people, if they are
like Batson's participants, would fall short of being vicious in
this context:



(4)
An unfair person
would not reliably let his unfair behavior be significantly diminished
or eliminated given either increased self-awareness or when
momentarily adopting the perspective of another person.

Yet the experimental manipulations Batson introduced involving a
mirror and the instructions to imagine yourself in the place of the
other person, seemed to eliminate the unfair behavior altogether.


To note one more interesting conflict with unfairness, consider the
motivational picture which emerged in the last few studies that were
reviewed concerning fairness norms. Batson's results suggested
that participants were motivated to do the morally right/fair thing,
but when the flip of the coin went against them, this dutiful
motivation would often be outweighed by self-interested
motivation. Yet on a traditional Aristotelian picture of the
vices:



(5)
 An unfair person is not reliably motivated to do the morally
right thing, even if that motivation ends up being outweighed, but
rather is motivated to do what is unfair.

This might be too strong a characterization of an unfair person in an ordinary sense, but again we are focusing on the viciously unfair person. Yet it turned out that the participants seemed to be experiencing motivation to do the right thing. Furthermore, if they were motivationally conflicted but gave in to self-interested motivation, they would be weak of will or incontinent on the Aristotelian picture, rather than vicious.


So one could argue Batson's results do not sit comfortably
either with the widespread possession of the virtue of fairness or the vice of
unfairness. Instead they suggest that we have beliefs and desires like
these:



* Beliefs about what is fair and what is not fair, and the
importance of being fair.
* Beliefs about the relationship between not complying with certain
fairness norms and various personal benefits such as increased time,
money, alternative activities, and so forth.
* Desires in favor of being fair when doing so will contribute
towards complying with the relevant fairness norms, provided the
benefits of doing so are not (significantly) outweighed by the
costs.
* Desires in favor of not being fair when the benefits of complying
with the relevant fairness norms are (significantly) outweighed by the
costs, while also desiring to as much as possible still appear to be
fair both to others and to oneself.



While certainly not an exhaustive list, these mental states do seem
like a mixed bag, morally speaking. Some of them are quite morally
admirable, such as those in the first set, and by themselves could
give rise to positive moral behavior. Others, of course, are not
morally admirable, and they can help to explain the unfair behavior we
see in Batson's studies (For the development of a Mixed Trait
approach to character along these lines, see Miller 2013, 2014,
2015).


## 5. Personality Traits, Economic Games, and Justice


Here is a general observation about the results we have seen in
this essay. For each of the studies, there was rarely uniformity in
behavior by all the participants in a particular situation. Indeed, in
some cases there were striking differences. For instance, we saw that
in the Forsythe study of dictator games, 21% gave nothing and 21% gave
the equal amount of $10, leaving 58% somewhere in-between (Forsythe et
al. 1994: 362). We also saw that many people would pay $9 to take an
exit option in Dana's dictator studies, but many people also
would not (Dana et al. 2006). Or in Batson's studies, many
participants would assign themselves to the positive consequence task,
but rarely would everyone do this.


So there appear to be important individual differences in behavior
among participants in these game environments. Since the situation a
given group of participants is confronting is the same, it is only
natural to think that the ensuing differences in behavior might be
explained, at least in part, by differences in their underlying
personality traits. If this turns out to be the case, then if we learn
something about their personality, we could more accurately predict
how they would subsequently behave in these games, as well as in other
relevant situations. In other words, individual differences in the
moral psychology of a person's justice relevant traits, can
translate into individual differences in justice relevant
behavior. And knowing something about the former can help us predict
the latter.


It turns out that there is in fact some evidence linking certain
personality traits with behavior in these games. Here I briefly
mention three such instances where evidence has been found. Spending a
moment on each of them is also worthwhile because of what we can learn
more generally about the moral psychology of justice beyond what
economic games tell us (for a massive meta-analysis of 60 years of research on the relationship between personality traits and behavior in six economic games, including the dictator and ultimatum games, see Thielmann et al. 2020).


*The Big Five*. The Big Five personality traits (or
Five-Factor model) have come to dominate the field of personality,
with thousands of relevant papers appearing in just the past five
years (for an overview, see John et al. 2008). Results from these
studies have repeatedly pointed in the direction of five basic
dimensions of personality with the following most commonly used
labels:



* Extraversion (also labeled Surgency, Energy, Enthusiasm)
* Agreeableness (also labeled Altruism, Affection)
* Conscientiousness (also labeled Constraint, Control of Impulse)
* Neuroticism (also labeled Emotional Instability, Negative Emotionality, Nervousness)
* Openness (also labeled Intellect, Culture, Originality, Open-Mindedness)



The idea, then, is that in a typical group there will be people who
differ in their ratings on each of these five dimensions. Some, for
instance, might be high on extraversion, which can be interpreted as
involving an energetic approach towards social interaction manifested
in, for instance, the behavior of attending more parties and
introducing themselves to strangers (John et al. 2008: 120). Others
might be quite introverted instead.


Advocates of this approach typically have hierarchical models of
personality traits in mind, where the Big Five are subdivided into
different "facets" that are less broad and so are claimed
to have increased accuracy (for details, see Paunonen 1998). To cite
one example, here are the 30 facets from Robert McCrae and Paul
Costa's version of the Five-Factor Model (Costa and McCrae 1995:
28):



* Neuroticism: Anxiety, Angry Hostility, Depression,
Self-Consciousness, Impulsiveness, Vulnerability
* Extraversion: Warmth, Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Activity,
Excitement Seeking, Positive Emotions
* Openness to Experience: Fantasy, Aesthetics, Feelings, Actions,
Ideas, Values
* Agreeableness: Trust, Straightforwardness, Altruism, Compliance,
Modesty, Tender-Mindedness
* Conscientiousness: Competence, Order, Dutifulness, Achievement
Striving, Self-Discipline, Deliberation



In their 240 item survey instrument, the NEO-PI-R, 8 items are
designed to measure each of these facets. For instance, "I keep
my belongings neat and clean" and "I like to keep
everything in its place so I know just where it is" are two
items for the consciousness facet of order (Costa and McCrae 1992:
73).


It is noteworthy that there is nothing on the list of Big Five
traits or their facets that seems directly related to justice. But in
recent years connections have been established between performance on
economic games and the Big Five (for a review, see Zhao and Smillie
2015). The most pronounced finding among the Big Five traits is that
higher agreeableness is correlated with higher allocations to the
recipient in a dictator game. In one meta-analysis, the sample
weighted average correlation was \(r\_{wa} = .18\). A negative
correlation of \(r\_{wa} = -.10\) was also found for rejecting fewer
offers in ultimatum games (Zhao and Smillie 2015:
288). Conscientiousness has also been linked to lower allocations in
dictator games (Ben-Ner et al. 2004). Studies on the other Big Five
traits have been more inconsistent in their results, and are also few
and far between.


*The HEXACO*. Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee have proposed a
six-factor model of personality (Ashton & Lee 2001, 2005 and Lee
& Ashton 2004). Five of the factors carry over with minor
modifications from the Big Five taxonomy. The key addition is a sixth
factor which they call honesty-humility, and which they describe this
way:



>  Persons with very high scores on the Honesty-Humility
> scale avoid manipulating others for personal gain, feel little
> temptation to break rules, are uninterested in lavish wealth and
> luxuries, and feel no special entitlement to elevated social
> status. Conversely, persons with very low scores on this scale will
> flatter others to get what they want, are inclined to break rules for
> personal profit, are motivated by material gain, and feel a strong
> sense of self-importance. (Lee & Ashton 2015, Other Internet
> Resources).
> 
> 


Honesty-humility in turn has four facets: sincerity, fairness,
greed avoidance, and modesty. Most relevant for our purposes is
naturally the fairness facet. As part of the 100-item HEXACO-PI-R
inventory, the following are the items which are labeled under
fairness:



12.
 If I knew that I could never get caught, I would be willing to
steal a million dollars.
36.
 I would be tempted to buy stolen property if I were financially
tight.
60.
 I would never accept a bribe, even if it were very
large.
84.
 I'd be tempted to use counterfeit money, if I were sure I
could get away with it.

Now one might wonder about whether these are really best understood
as *fairness* items. They might seem to relate at the
conceptual level more to honesty than to justice. But let's
leave that terminological point to one side.


For it turns out that significant statistical relationships have
been found with behavior in bargaining games (for a review, see Zhao
and Smillie 2015). In the same meta-analysis, for instance, the sample
weighted average correlation was \(r\_{wa} = .24\) between dictator
allocation amount and honesty-humility (291). Another meta-analysis
reported a correlation of \(r\_{wa} = .29\) (Hilbig et al. 2015:
92). So too was there a negative correlation between HEXACO
agreeableness and rejecting offers in ultimatum games (\(r\_{wa}=
-.16\)) (Zhao and Smillie 2015: 288). Furthermore, one study found
that of those who were high in honesty-humility, 64.4% chose the 50/50
allocation in the dictator game, while only 34.6% did who were low on
this dimension (Hilbig et al. 2015: 92).


Benjamin Hilbig and Ingo Zettler (2009) provide a nice experimental
demonstration of this relationship. Participants completed the
HEXACO-PI and played a dictator game and an ultimatum game with an
initial allocation of 100 points for each game. As expected, those who
were higher in honesty-humility gave fewer points to themselves in
both games (518). More interesting was the consistency in
allocations *between* the two games. Those lowest in
honesty-humility allocated an almost equal amount of points to
themselves and the other person in the ultimatum game. But in the
dictator game, where there was no threat of rejection by the other
person, the average allocation for participants to keep was almost 80
points. By way of contrast, those highest in honesty-humility showed
no significant difference in their allocations in the two games. In
other words, they were consistently fair, whereas the other group of
participants was only being fair when it was to their advantage
(518-519).


*Justice Sensitivity*. A relatively new and particularly
exciting development in personality psychology has been the study of
what is being called "justice sensitivity". The basic idea
is that individuals differ in general on this trait, which can be
understood at its heart as a motive for justice (Stavrova and
Schlosser 2015: 3). After several refinements, consensus seems to be
emerging around four facets for this trait (Schmitt et al. 2010;
Stavrova and Schlosser 2015):



JSVictim: Sensitivity to becoming a victim of
injustice.


JSObserver: Sensitivity to witnessing injustice.


JSBeneficiary: Sensitivity to passively benefiting from
injustice.


JSPerpetrator: Sensitivity to actively committing
injustice.


 (Stavrova and Schlosser 2015: 3)



Three of these--observer, beneficiary, and perpetrator
sensitivity--are other-focused aspects of justice sensitivity,
whereas victim sensitivity is self-focused on one's being
treated fairly (Stavrova and Schlosser 2015: 3; Schlosser et al. 2018: 76-77). This makes a
difference statistically. For instance, victim sensitivity tends to
correlate with anti-social personality traits--such as
Machiavellianism--in a way that the first three do not.


But all four of these facets are indeed statistically related to
each other, and at the same time are distinguishable pieces of a
stable trait of justice sensitivity. While they do correlate with
other personality traits such as the Big Five, the correlations are
typically on the low side, which can be taken as evidence that justice
sensitivity itself is a distinct trait (for a review, see Schmitt et
al. 2010).


 A well validated measure of justice sensitivity has been developed
by Manfred Schmitt and his colleagues, with 10 items for each of the
four facets (Schmitt et al. 2010). For instance, here are the items
for beneficiary sensitivity:



* It disturbs me when I receive what others ought to have.
* I have a bad conscience when I receive a reward that someone else
has earned.
* I cannot easily bear it to unilaterally profit from others.
* It takes me a long time to forget when others have to fix my
carelessness.
* It disturbs me when I receive more opportunities than others to
develop my skills.
* I feel guilty when I am better off than others for no reason.
* It bothers me when things come easily to me that others have to
work hard for.
* I ruminate for a long time about being treated nicer than others
for no reason.
* It bothers me when someone tolerates things with me that other
people are being criticized for.
* I feel guilty when I receive better treatment than others.
* (Schmitt et al. 2010: 234)



Participants complete these items using a scale which ranges from 0
(not at all) to 5 (exactly).


Using this measure of justice sensitivity, some interesting work is
being done. For instance, Gollwitzer and his colleagues (2005)
examined the willingness of West Germans to contribute to East Germany
to help improve living conditions, as there is a large disparity even
years after the wall came down. Some particular proposals included an
automatic deduction from the salaries of West Germans that would be
used for job creation in East Germany, and the implementation of
affirmative action hiring policies which would favor East over West
Germans for new positions. It turned out that beneficiary sensitivity,
for instance, was found to predict solidarity with East Germans,
whereas victim sensitivity did not (Gollwitzer et al. 2005: 191).


In another study, Thomas Schlosser and his colleagues (2018) examined whether justice sensitivity predicts wealth distribution. They used a version of the welfare state game in which participants were assigned to be an upper, middle, or lower class subject in a hypothetical society which they got to help shape. Specifically they chose between a society with lower inequality (person A received EUR5, B received EUR4, and C received EUR3) versus higher overall wealth but greater inequality (A received EUR10, B received EUR6, and C received EUR1). As expected, participants who were high on JSVictim (sensitivity to becoming a victim of injustice) were more likely to go with greater inequality if they were A or B, but greater equality if they were C. Participants who were high on the other three dimensions of justice sensitivity were more likely to choose less inequality regardless of whether they were A, B, or C (Schlosser et al. 2018: 79).


Most relevant for our purposes, participants who are high on victim
sensitivity are less likely to allocate 50/50 in dictator games,
whereas the opposite is true for the other facets of justice
sensitivity. Hence Detlef Fetchenhauer and Xu Huang (2004) found that
observer sensitivity correlated .21 with an equal allocation, and
perpetrator sensitivity correlated .30. On the other hand, victim
sensitivity was negatively correlated at [?].18 (Fetchenhauer and
Huang 2004: 1024).


Further research in this area of the moral psychology of justice
looks to be especially promising in the years to come (for additional
noteworthy studies, see Dalbert and Umlauft 2009; Lotz et al 2013;
Edele et al. 2013).


## 6. Conclusion


At this point, it is tempting to speculate about what some of the
broader implications might be of these empirical findings. For
instance, what can they tell us about how to design a just society? If
we should assume that most of us suffer from moral hypocrisy to enough
of an extent that we are not fair people, does that support more
active monitoring by the state to detect unfair behavior? How might we
practically implement the findings about mirrors (should they be
strategically placed around the public square to encourage fair
behavior?) and empathy (should there be regular public reminders to
imagine what others are going through who are less fortunate?)? And
what other lessons can we extrapolate from this research to help us
improve society? This is not the place to explore these questions, but
they are a natural next step.


Of course, allocation decisions in real life tend to be much more complicated
than simple dictator or ultimatum games. But as we have seen, these
games and their many different variations can shed important light on
the moral psychology of justice. Clearly no simple story about our
motives to be just or fair is going to be plausible. We are more
complex creatures than that.