ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2026
Social value orientation modulates fairness decision-making in empathic contexts: evidence from event-related potentials and neural oscillations.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Fairness is essential for balancing interests and mitigating social conflict. People's rejection of unfairness is influenced by contextual factors (e.g. empathic concern) and individual traits including social value orientation (SVO). This study examines how individuals with different SVOs make trade-offs between empathic concern and fairness without involving their own interests. Participants played a modified ultimatum game, in which they made decisions on behalf of either a beneficiary of a public welfare project (empathy) or a stranger (non-empathy), choosing whether to accept or reject allocation offers. Results showed that empathy increased participants' tolerance for unfair offers, particularly among prosocials, who accepted more disadvantageous offers than proselfs did. EEG results showed that proselfs exhibited reduced N1 amplitudes in empathic conditions, reflecting attentional avoidance. Moreover, in the empathy condition, an unfairness-related MFN was observed only in proselfs. The absence of this typical MFN response in prosocials provides neural evidence for their active downregulation of unfairness aversion to prioritize the interests of empathic targets. In addition, prosocials showed stronger parietal-occipital alpha suppression and reduced P3 amplitude in empathy contexts, indicating heightened attentional arousal and greater allocation of cognitive resources. These findings highlight the crucial role of empathic concern and SVO in fairness decision-making.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.