Fairness And Fairness Bias Behavior Of Reward Distribution In An Ambiguous Situations

The narrow sense of distributive justice is to reasonably divide the resources among the participants in a given situation.However,considering the reality,the allocated resources are usually generated by the participants working together,rather than manna from heaven.Therefore,researchers are more inclined to define distributive justice as a reasonable distribution based on the efforts of participants.The fairness bias is a deviation from the reasonable allocation of resources.For a long time,scholars’ enthusiasm for distributive justice has been increasing.This paper summarizes the factors that affect distributive justice.Combining with the theoretical explanation of fairness bias,this paper attempts to explore the effects of ambiguous situation and task characteristics on individuals’ fairness behavior and fairness bias of reward distribution.This paper is composed of two studies: Study 1 investigates the effect of relative contribution on participants’ reward allocation decisions under different ways of knowing how much they contribution.In Experiment 1,a mixed design of 2(knowing mode: others-report,self-report)×2(relative contribution: low contribution,high contribution),in which the knowing mode was the between-subjects variable,the relative contribution was the within-subjects variable,and the dependent variable was the amount of money given by the dictator game in Stage 2.The results showed that others-report group had a higher degree of fairness based on the contribution principle than the self-report group,and the self-report group had a certain degree of middle(50/50)tendency in the allocation of money.On the basis of study 1,study 2 investigated whether relative contribution and difficulty of the joint task had an interaction with the distribution scheme under the condition of ambiguous information about the contribution rate of the task.In Experiment 2,a within-subject design of 2(relative contribution: low contribution,high contribution)× 2(relative difficulty: easy,difficult).The dependent variable was the amount of money participants gave themselves in the dictator game in Stage 2.The results showed that there was no significant difference between the amount of money given to the difficult task and the easy task in the low contribution condition.However,in the high-contribution condition,the amount of money given to the participants in the difficult task was significantly lower than that given to the participants in the simple task.Through the above two studies,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Contributions rule is a widely accepted behavioral norm by joint workers.(2)Make clear the relative contribution of the participants in the joint task,and the reward distribution is the fairest.(3)In an ambiguous situation,the main reason for the fairness bias of the participants may be the cognitive bias of relative contribution.(4)When the joint task had relative high and low contribution,there was a tradeoff effect,that is,they distribute more money in the relatively low contribution task and less in the relatively high contribution task..