The effects of free will belief and ego depletion on the decisions made in the ultimatum game

The general purpose of this study is to examine the psychological mechanisms that play a role in people's acceptance or rejection of offers perceived as unfair. There are different theories in the economy games, such as strong reciprocity, reciprocal fairness, and inequity aversion, which try to explain the making and acceptance of unfair offers. These theories are based on concepts such as reciprocity, responsibility, guilt, punishment, and resource allocation. Intertwined with these concepts and used in decision-making studies, Ego depletion has been used, albeit little, in examining economic behavior. However, the effect of free will belief on this situation has not been studied sufficiently in both international and national literature. In this study, ego depletion and free will beliefs were examined in an experimental study to what extent participants would accept or reject the unfair offers offered to them in the Ultimatum game. In the ultimatum game, there are two parties, a porposer who offer to allocate a certain amount of resources as they wish and a responder who have the opportunity to accept or reject this offer. When the proposal is accepted, resource sharing takes place as suggested by the proposer, but when rejected, neither side gets any share of the resources. This research is an experimental study with 2 (Ego Depletion Condition / Control Condition) X 3 (Belief in Free Will Increased Condition / Control Condition / Belief in Free Will Decreased Condition) between-subject factorial design. A total of 523 people, 334 women and 189 men, who participated in the study, were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions. Participants first filled out the demographic information form. Later, they filled the free will belief scale and played the Ultimatum game. In this game, all participants encounter an offer where a certain amount of money is allocated by the other person. The dependent variable of the research is the amount of money that the participants collect when they accept the offer made to them. The data were analyzed by ANCOVA and Post Hoc Tukey tests. Accordingly, the amount of money earned by the participants in the ultimatum game did not differ significantly according to the conditions of ego depletion. Significant differences have emerged according to the conditions of free will belief. Under the condition that the belief in free will was reinforced, the participants rejected the unfair offers in the Ultimatum game more and left the game with the least amount of money. In addition, in the condition where the belief of free will was reduced, the participants rejected the unfair offers less and left the game with the highest amount of money. In this case, it has been found that as the person's belief in free will increases, they reject unfair offers more than those with low free will beliefs. The findings and limitations of the study were discussed within the framework of the literature.