Discussion

the responders’ types as within-subjects variable and the constraints’ types as between-subjects variable. Since the assumption of sphericity (Mauchly’s W(5)=0.578, p <.001) was not verified, it was used the Greenhouse-Geisser correction for violation of sphericity. Results highlighted that the interaction between responders’ type and constraints’ type factors was not significant (F(2.000,54.000) = 1.010, p < .371). Given the absence of interaction between responders’ and constraints’ types, we were induced to conclude that participants, irrespectively of the constraints embedded in the instructions, activate relevant mindreading processes which induce them to reciprocate in a different way according to the presumed psychological features of their counterparts.

However, since it was held it necessary to identify the type of instruction that would have been employed in the next studies, we chose to use the maximizing instruction. In fact, we exclude the spontaneous instruction because it emerged that people, without any monetary gain constraint, showed an exaggerated altruistic attitude, above all toward Marco, whose life could actually induce a hyper-altruistic behaviour. On the contrary, it seemed that the threshold constraint led people to an excessive concern about money, keeping them from taking into the right account the psychological features of their opponents. So, given the importance of some type of monetary constraint, we opted for the maximizing instruction which turned out to allow people to avoid offering to the extremes, both high (spontaneous) and low (threshold) sums of money.

In particular, we focussed on the figure of the proposer, since we believe that his role in the game, a part from being underestimated by most research in this field, appeared more interesting from a psychological point of view than the figure of the responder. Making his offer to the responder, the proposer has to take into consideration various aspects on which the success of the task depends. Firstly, the proposer always experiences uncertainty about the outcome of his decision since he can never be sure of his offer being accepted. Secondly, the proposer does not make the decision alone, in an isolated context, but, rather, in a strategic interactive environment which induces him to consider the responder’s reaction to his own offer and, as a consequence, leads him to activate mindreading processes and to assume the responder’s mental perspective.

Finally, the offer made by the proposer consists of an open choice since it ranges through a continuous series of values and it is not constrained in given options, as it occurs for the responder who could only accept or reject the offer.

We employed the Ultimatum Game as a setting useful to shed light on how people face the conflict arising by the opposite tendencies of maximizing self-interest and of considering the other persons' perspective. Specifically we were interested in assessing whether individual can apply relevant mindreading processes in order to identify the psychological features of their partners, so to realize when they can risk to offer low sums of money by presuming that the counterpart will accept them.

The effectiveness of mindreading processes activation is now well-known thanks to contributions coming from other field of research, above all the social psychology, which proved that taking into consideration others’ perspectives increases the likelihood of helping people in need (Batson, 1994), the success in negotiation (Neale & Bazerman, 1983) and in conflict resolution (Paese &

Yonker, 2001), and decreases the likelihood of egocentric biases in making judgments (Savitsky et al., 2005). However, since in experimental economics research on the role of mindreading processes have recently developed and, in particular, in Ultimatum Game research have rarely been investigated, we

believe that establishing the importance of these processes in economic interactions represents a further step in this field of research. In fact, we found that participants can modulate their offers by considering aspects of the responders such has honesty, sense of justice, and personal dignity. The sums of money they proposed to their partners varied in a systematic and consistent way according to the psychological portraits they have been provided with. It is worth noticing that this happened in an experimental procedure where no direct and explicit hints at mindreading were provided, and not when, as in Hoffman et al.’s (2000) study, participants were explicitly instructed to think about the counterparts' mental states. Compared to Hoffman et al.’s (2000), who concluded that by taking the other’s perspective people were induced to make higher offers, we found that mindreading processes do not lead to a general increase in the absolute amount of the offers (which may increase the likelihood of having the offers accepted, but at the expense of a greater possible personal gain), but rather to a strategic and functional differentiation of the offers (which increases the likelihood of ending up with a certain amount of money by inducing proposers to renounce considerable sums of money only if it is really necessary). A possible speculation could be that the study by Hoffman et al.’s (2000) and our study induced different type of processes. While in the former the ability to share the feelings of others, the so-called “emphaty” was involved, in the latter the capacity to represent others’ intentions, beliefs and expectations, the so-called “theory of mind” was implicated. In fact, in Hoffman’s study, people were hinted at thinking about their opponent, who was not presented with specific psychological features, so that we could easily suppose that people tried to imagine an abstract character who may have induced them to feel emphatic with this character. Not being characterized in a psychological way, proposers were free to imagine whatever responder, and, as a consequence, they could imagine a general person to whom they probably feel close. On the contrary, in our study proposers were explicitly induced to take into consideration the specific psychological portraits of their opponents who were negatively or

positively characterized. This have probably led people not to share the others’

feeling, but, rather, to represent their intentions and expectations. In fact, even if empathizing and mentalizing have a common ground, they are not exactly the same process. Whereas empathy is likely to render people less selfish and motivates other-regarding behaviours because it allows the sharing of feelings with others (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987), mindreading could also be useful for making self-interested choice because it permits people to anticipate and predict others’ behaviour accurately (Singer & Fehr, 2005).

Being understood that proposers were able to differentiate their offers depending on the type of responder they played with, an issue which is worth deepening is trying to clarify why proposers, generally speaking, made equal and fair offers (mean offers were never below 35% of the entire sum of money). The question is: which motives are behind their offers? Two possible explanations have been suggested in literature (Scheres & Sanfey, 2006). One, people may equally split money because they care about equity and fairness (Bolton & Ockenfels, 2000).

Two, proposers may anticipate that responders will reject too low offers (Roth et al., 1991). Whereas in the first case people would be fair and other-regarding, in the second case people would be simply strategic by making a decision which would increase the likelihood of having their offers accepted. Far from being altruistic, they would care above all about their own personal gain. If people in our study were purely altruistic, they would offer always the same high amount of money, regardless of the specific portraits of each responder. A mere other-regarding attitude would have led proposers to make equally fair offers to all responders, instead of differentiating the proposals. On the contrary, they seem to adopt a behaviour which is altruistic only in appearance (Croson, 1996;

Kagel, Kim & Moser, 1996; Pillutla & Murnighan, 1995), since, as a matter of fact, they show a self-oriented, functional, and strategic behaviour. In fact they are prone to renounce their maximum possible gain in order to be sure, or at least more certain, that their offers would be accepted. It could be defined as a form of “sophisticated” selfishness which derives from the awareness of the

“irrationality” of their opponent. It could be the case that proposers realize when low offers may be rejected, so they maximize their gain by acting “as if” they are fair (Weg & Zwick, 1994). This finding is in line with what Scheres &

Sanfey (2006) found. By employing both Ultimatum Game (where offers are a relatively pure measure of altruism) and Dictator Game (where offers are a mixture of fairness and strategy) they could determine the motivations behind the offers in these tasks. It turned out that Dictator Game offers were lower than the Ultimatum Game offers, thus reflecting the strategic component of the offers made.

Moreover, the present showed that people can activate relevant mindreading processes which allows them to make appropriate offers to each type of responders even when they are forced to explicitly care about their personal monetary gain. In fact, regardless of the type of instruction they were presented with, people keep on differentiating their offers even if they were told to focus on a monetary threshold. This further substantiate the conclusion that people, rather than being altruistic, show a strategic and functional behaviour. Not even if, but exactly because of the strict monetary constraint people differentiate their offers, so to be sure that they will be accepted and to reach the established threshold.