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In-group and out-group social influence on punishment in unfair situations

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Abstract

People’s beliefs and behaviors are influenced by the preferences and behaviors of those around them. This effect is known as “social influence.” Previous studies have found that ingroup favoritism can modulate the effect of social influence on individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. In this study, we investigated the interaction of ingroup favoritism and social influence on punishment decisions in unfair situations. In experiment 1, the ultimatum game was used to assess participant’ response to unfairness directed toward oneself in in-group and out-group social influence contexts. In experiment 2, we used a third-party dictator game to examine how ingroup favoritism modulates the effect of social influence on participants’ responses to unfairness toward others. The interaction effect demonstrated that ingroup favoritism was particularly pronounced when the social influence suggested punishment, and absent when social influence suggested no punishment. Conversely, no such interaction was found in the ultimatum game. Our findings suggest that people draw psychologically relevant distinctions between unfairness toward themselves and unfairness toward others.

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Data Availability

The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the Zenodo repository, [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5712011].

Code Availability

Not applicable.

Research ethics approval was obtained from the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and is in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Consent to Participate Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in the study.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the reviewers for their constructive comments that improved the manuscript considerably.

Funding

This study was supported by grants from the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Projects of the Ministry of Education (grant numbers 21YJC840026), the National Social Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 19CSH053) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant numbers JBK2102028) in China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute of Social Development, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China

    Zhenyu Wei

  2. School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

    Yi Ding

  3. School of Finance, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China

    Xujun Liu & Shiqi Dai

Authors
  1. Zhenyu Wei
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  2. Yi Ding
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  3. Xujun Liu
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  4. Shiqi Dai
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Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: ZW. Program the task: ZW. Performed the.

experiments: XL and SD. Analyzed the data: ZW. Wrote the paper: ZW and YD.

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Correspondence to Zhenyu Wei.

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Wei, Z., Ding, Y., Liu, X. et al. In-group and out-group social influence on punishment in unfair situations. Curr Psychol 42, 18396–18404 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03027-9

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