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Cognitive processes underlying distributional preferences: a response time study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Fadong Chen  and
Urs Fischbacher Open the ORCID record for Urs Fischbacher [Opens in a new window]
Fadong Chen*
Affiliation:
School of Management, Zhejiang University, 310058 Hangzhou, China Neuromanagement Lab, Zhejiang University, 310058 Hangzhou, China
Urs Fischbacher*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstr. 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany Thurgau Institute of Economics, Hauptstr. 90, 8280 Kreuzlingen, Switzerland
*
fadongchen@zju.edu.cn
Urs.Fischbacher@uni-konstanz.de
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Abstract

There is ample evidence that people differ considerably in their preferences. We identify individual heterogeneity in type and strength of social preferences in a series of binary three-person dictator games. Based on this identification, we analyze response times in another series of games to investigate the cognitive processes of distributional preferences. We find that response time increases with the number of conflicts between individually relevant motives and decreases with the utility difference between choice options. The selfish motive is more intuitive for subjects who are more selfish. Our findings indicate that the sequential sampling process and the intuition of selfishness jointly produce distribution decisions, and provide an explanation for the mixed results on the correlations between response time and prosociality. Our results also show that it is important to take heterogeneity of preferences into account when investigating the cognitive processes of social decision making.

Keywords

Distributional preferencesCognitive processResponse timeHeterogeneity

JEL classification

D30: General A12: Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines D87: Neuroeconomics C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games

Information

Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 421 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-019-09618-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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