Mood Effects on Selfishness Versus Fairness: Affective Influences on Social Decisions in the Ultimatum Game

Many social decisions involve a basic conflict between selfishness versus fairness. In the ultimatum game, proposers divide resources between themselves and others, and responders can accept or veto such allocations. Two experiments predicted and found that mood influenced the decision-making strategies of both proposers and responders. In Experiment 1, negative mood produced fairer allocations to a partner compared to positive mood, and such decisions also took longer to perform consistent with more accommodative processing. Experiment 2 explored the behavior of responders; negative mood now increased the rejection of unfair offers, consistent with increased concern with fairness. The results are discussed in terms recent affect-cognition theories, suggesting that positive mood recruits more assimilative, and internally oriented processing that promotes selfishness, while negative affect induces more externally oriented, accommodative thinking and greater concern with social norms. The implications of th...