Advantageous and disadvantageous inequality aversion can be taught through learning of others’ preferences

While enforcing egalitarian social norms is critical for human society, punishing social norm violators often incurs a cost to the self. This cost looms even larger when one can benefit from an unequal distribution of resources, a phenomenon known as advantageous inequity—for example, receiving a higher salary than a colleague with the identical role. In the Ultimatum Game, a classic testbed for fairness norm enforcement, individuals rarely reject (or punish) such unequal proposed divisions of resources because doing so entails a sacrifice of one’s own benefit. Recent work has demonstrated that observing and implementing another’s punitive responses to unfairness can efficiently alter the punitive preferences of an observer. It remains an open question, however, whether such contagion is powerful enough to impart advantageous inequity aversion to individuals—that is, can observing another’s preferences to punish inequity result in increased enforcement of equality norms, even in the difficult case of Advantageous inequity? Using a variant of the Ultimatum Game in which participants are tasked with responding to fairness violations on behalf of another ‘Teacher’—whose aversion to advantageous (versus disadvantageous) inequity was systematically manipulated—we probe whether individuals subsequently increase their punishment unfairly after experiencing fairness violations on their own behalf. In two experiments, we found individuals can acquire aversion to advantageous inequity through observing (and implementing) the Teacher’s preferences. Computationally, these learning effects were best characterized by a model which learns the latent structure of the Teacher’s preferences, rather than a simple Reinforcement Learning account. In summary, our study is the first to demonstrate that people can swiftly and readily acquire another’s preferences for advantageous inequity, suggesting in turn that behavioral contagion may be one promising mechanism through which social norm enforcement—which people rarely implement in the case of advantageous inequality—can be enhanced.