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Category: Project

Description: Human decision-making behaviors in social contexts are largely driven by fairness considerations. The dual-process model suggests that in addition to cognitive processes, emotion contributes to economic decision-making. Although humor, as an effective emotional regulation strategy to induce positive emotion, may influence an individual’s emotional state and decision-making behavior, previous studies have not examined how humor modulates fairness-related responses in the gain and loss contexts simultaneously. This study explores this issue using the Ultimatum Game (UG) and investigates how humor affects fairness-related decision-making in gain and loss contexts. The results of the present study extend prior research and confirm our hypothesis regarding a positive emotion-moderating effect of humor. Specifically, in the gain context, increased acceptance rates occurred after participants viewed humorous pictures compared to humorless pictures, and this effect was moderated by the offer size. However, we did not find the same effect in the loss context. These findings indicate that humor-related positive emotions affecting considerations of fairness may depend on the context and provide insight into the finite power of humor in human sociality, cooperation and norm compliance.