Fairness is What You Can Get Away With: Proposer and Responder Behaviour in a Collective Action Ultimatum Game

The collective action of subordinates has historically been the most important factor constraining exploitative behaviour of powerful individuals. However, subordinate collective action is often overlooked within the psychological literature examining the effect of power on decision making. Using a modified multiplayer version of the Ultimatum Game, we investigated how the ease of collective action affected the decision making of Proposers and Responders. Altogether 256 students took part in a 20-round Collective Action Ultimatum Game. They were divided into four conditions and into fixed groups of four (three Responders per group). The ease of collective action was operationalized as the contribution responders needed to make to a ‘collective pot’ to prevent the Proposer receiving their allocation. The mechanism that determined how total contributions could result in a successful rejection varied between the four conditions (‘Easy’, ‘Medium’, ‘Hard’ and ‘Impossible’). The study found that Proposers in the Easy/Medium conditions divided resources more equally than those in the Hard/Impossible conditions from the start of the game. Results also showed that ease did not affect Responders willingness to engage in collective action, but in the Hard condition they became more accepting of unequal offers as the game progressed. Results suggest that the ease of collective action (i) induces more egalitarian behaviour by individuals in a position of power, and (ii) makes subordinates less willing to accept inequality