The Fun Is Worth the Fine: Or Is It? An Analytical Dive into How Ethnicities Affect Economic Decisions in the Ultimatum Game

Abstract

Economic games are experiments that assist researchers in understanding exchange systems and people’s behaviors in said processes. Cash is typically included to imitate real-world incentives, motivating participants to play genuinely. Previous research in regard to attitudes in economic games has shown that players base their actions on judgments of the other player’s social group membership and perceived warmth and competence. However, relatively little research explored this behavior in economic games when applied to members of different ethnic groups. The present study aimed to explore how people’s ethnic identities, as well as their predetermined attitudes toward other ethnicities, influence their actions relative to other people’s behavior. The study’s methods required participants to complete a Qualtrics survey consisting of three sections: the first section asked for the participants’ demographics, including ethnicity; the second section instructed participants to take part in the Ultimatum Game, a type of economic game, as receivers against varying proposals with facial images of different ethnicities (to represent fake proposers); the participants then proceeded to a semantic differential survey in the third section, which asked for participants’ explicit attitudes toward various ethnic groups. Data analyses revealed a negative correlation between explicit attitudes toward out-group proposers versus participants’ acceptance rates for favorable trials from out-group proposers, which diverges from the original hypothesis. The outcome paints a narrative that displays people’s economic decisions as affected by how advantageous the proposals are and shows the effect ethnicity has towards decision-making related to economic situations. Keywords: economic games, Ultimatum Game, race, ethnicity, group bias, fairness