I win it's fair, you win it's not. Selective heeding of merit in ambiguous settings.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 36608024.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0279865 and PMC identifier 9821486.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
One's willingness to accept an outcome or even to correct it depends on whether the underlying procedure is deemed legitimate. We examine a modified version of the dictator game, where dictatorship is assigned by a fair procedure that is linked to the participant actions but in effect is completely random, to illustrate that this belief is not independent of the outcome and is self-serving in its nature. We also discuss the perceptions of fairness and merit as potential drivers of the observed behavioral phenomenon.