Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Aug 15:77:246-53.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.03.048. Epub 2013 Apr 3.

Increased neural responses to unfairness in a loss context

Xiuyan Guo  1 , Li Zheng, Lei Zhu, Jianqi Li, Qianfeng Wang, Zoltan Dienes, Zhiliang Yang
Affiliations

Increased neural responses to unfairness in a loss context

Xiuyan Guo et al. Neuroimage. .

Abstract

Unfairness plays an important role in economic decision making. This fMRI study sought to investigate how the loss and the gain contexts could modulate behavioral and brain responses to unfairness by focusing on participants' rejection behaviors during an Ultimatum Game paradigm. Participants were scanned while they were playing the Ultimatum Game as responders in both loss and gain contexts, i.e. receiving ¥50 as gains and paying for ¥50 as losses. At the behavioral level, lower fairness ratings and higher rejection rates were revealed for unfair losses than unfair gains. At the neural level, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, bilateral anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex/anterior middle cingulate cortex and bilateral dorsal striatum were associated with rejection (vs. acceptance) in the loss context, but not in the gain context. Together, our data indicated that participants may experience more unfairness in UG and stronger desire to sanction social norm violations in the loss context than in the gain context, inducing more fairness-related neutral activities when rejecting (vs. accepting) unfair losses than unfair gains. These findings shed light on the significance of context (i.e. loss or gain) in fairness-related social decision-making processes.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources