Social utility and decision making in interpersonal contexts.
Abstract
Three studies examined preferences for outcomes to self and a codisputant. Studies I and 2 estimated social utility functions from judgments of with alternative outcomes. Comparing functional forms, we found that a utility function, including terms for own payoff and for positive and negative discrepancies between the parties' payoffs (advantageous and disadvantageous inequality), provides a close fit to the data. The typical utility function is steeply increasing and convex for disadvantageous inequality and weakly declining and convex for advantageous inequality. We manipulated dispute type (personal, business) and disputant relationship (positive, neutral, or negative) and found that both strongly influence preferences for advantageous but not disadvantageous inequality. A third study contrasted implications of the social utility functions with predictions of individual utility theories. People care about the outcomes of others. We sacrifice our own interests to help loved ones or harm adversaries. Participants withdraw from profitable participation in a laboratory experiment if they perceive inequity in remuneration (Schmitt & Marweli, 1972). Players in two-person ultimatum games (in which one player proposes a distribution of a fixed amount of money that the other has the option of either accepting or rejecting) frequently reject a positive but inequitable offer even though the alternative is no gain at all (Guth, Schmittberger, & Schwarze, 1982). Negotiations between pa…
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Negotiators are strongly averse to settling even slightly below the point they view as fair.
“Third, negotiators are strongly averse to settling even slightly below the point they view as fair (Loewenstein, Thompson and Bazerman, 1989).”
From Explaining Bargaining Impasse: The Role of Self-Serving Biases (1997) · cites this paper as Loewenstein, Thompson and Bazerman, 1989
Cites
A theory of social comparison processes
Festinger, L. (1954) · Human Relations · doi:10.1177/001872675400700202 · Cited by 20,926 · see citing works
Regret Theory: An Alternative Theory of Rational Choice Under Uncertainty
Loomes, G., & Sugden, R. (1982) · The Economic Journal · doi:10.2307/2232669 · Cited by 4,042 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation
Fehr, E., & Schmidt, K. M. (1999) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355399556151 · Cited by 11,264 · see citing works
The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations.
Fiske, A. P. (1992) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.99.4.689 · Cited by 2,510 · see citing works
Falk, A., & Fischbacher, U. (2006) · Games and Economic Behavior · doi:10.1016/j.geb.2005.03.001 · Cited by 2,416 · see citing works
“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., McElreath, R., Alvard, M., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., et al. (2005) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x05000142 · Cited by 1,898 · see citing works
Neuronal Reward and Decision Signals: From Theories to Data
Schultz, W. (2015) · Physiological Reviews · doi:10.1152/physrev.00023.2014 · Cited by 1,126 · see citing works
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2002) · The Economic Journal · doi:10.1111/1468-0297.00027 · Cited by 1,061 · see citing works
Explaining Bargaining Impasse: The Role of Self-Serving Biases
Babcock, L., & Loewenstein, G. (1997) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.11.1.109 · Cited by 1,071 · see citing works
Self-citationThe ontogeny of fairness in seven societies
Blake, P. R., McAuliffe, K., Corbit, J., Callaghan, T. C., Barry, O., Bowie, A., Kleutsch, L., Kramer, K. L., Ross, E., Vongsachang, H., et al. (2015) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature15703 · Cited by 534 · see citing works
Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences
Tricomi, E., Rangel, A., Camerer, C. F., & O’Doherty, J. P. (2010) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature08785 · Cited by 462 · see citing works
The role of the striatum in social behavior
Báez-Mendoza, R., & Schultz, W. (2013) · Frontiers in Neuroscience · doi:10.3389/fnins.2013.00233 · Cited by 312 · see citing works
Falk, A., & Fischbacher, U. (2000) · doi:10.2139/ssrn.203115 · Cited by 293 · see citing works
The Impact of Relative Standards on the Propensity to Disclose
Acquisti, A., John, L. K., & Loewenstein, G. (2012) · Journal of Marketing Research · doi:10.1509/jmr.09.0215 · Cited by 247 · see citing works
Self-citationVan Kleef, G. A., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2006) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.91.1.124 · Cited by 227 · see citing works
Kogut, T. (2012) · Journal of Economic Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.joep.2011.10.003 · Cited by 132 · see citing works
It’s Only a Matter of Time: Death, Legacies, and Intergenerational Decisions
Wade-Benzoni, K. A., Tost, L. P., Hernandez, M., & Larrick, R. P. (2012) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/0956797612443967 · Cited by 95 · see citing works
Neural Correlates of Reinforcement Learning and Social Preferences in Competitive Bidding
van den Bos, W., Talwar, A., & McClure, S. M. (2013) · The Journal of Neuroscience · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.3095-12.2013 · Cited by 80 · see citing works
- Authors
- Loewenstein, G. F., Thompson, L., & Bazerman, M. H.
- Affiliations
- University of Chicago (US)
- University of Washington (US)
- Northwestern University (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Published
- 1989-09
- Volume
- 57
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 426-441
- ISSN
- 0022-3514 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-1315
- OpenAlex
- W2109954531
- Cited by
- 1,122
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 28 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 40 · 2020: 39 · 2019: 49 · 2018: 44 · 2017: 38 · 2016: 22 · 2015: 60 · 2014: 46 · 2013: 51 · 2012: 60
- FWCI
- 24.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Conflict Management and Negotiation
- Keywords
- social utility, interpersonal decision making, social preferences, inequality aversion, ultimatum game, interpersonal conflict, negotiation
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
