Investigation of inequity avodaince behavior in the frame of morality as cooperation theory

Many studies have been conducted to understand the underlying motivations of displaying avoidance of having less (disadvantageous inequtiy avoidance) or more (advantageous inequity avoidance) than others. Despite the cultural differences, one of the strategies to improve cooperation is described as inequity avoidance with moral attitudes including reciprocity and fairness sensitivities. Previous studies indicate that perception of fairness might be one of the important factors to understand the social-psychological aspects of cultural differences. In the first study, it is aimed to investigate the impact of social context for displaying inequity aversion while considering the impact of individual differences about moral values regarding reciprocity and fairness and the role of empathy. It is predicted that individuals will significantly reject the distributions less when they are more advantaged, specifically in a social context in which they are accustomed to being unable to refuse unfair allocations when they get less than others. In addition, both laboratory experiments and hypothetical scenarios are commonly used to investigate moral attitudes and behavior in the moral psychology literature. On the other hand, there is a scarcity of research investigating specifically inequity avoidance regarding the consistency of self-report and behavioral measures. Therefore, in the first study, participants were asked to respond to hypothetical scenarios including the same allocation procedure as in the second study including laboratory experiments. Thus, fairness related responses toward hypothetical allocation scenarios and behaviors in the real-life experiment were investigated using the same procedural design. Consistent with the hypotheses, the findings showed that fairness, reciprocity and empathy values predicted advantageous inequity avoidance, significantly. Although, contrary to hypotheses, the results showed that social context manipulation did not work in the expected direction. Finally, the results revealed that participants displayed less advantageous inequity avoidance in the experiment that have real money allocation procedure than those answered hypothetical scenarios.