THE INFLUENCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY ON RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO HYPOTHETICAL MORAL AGENTS AND FAIRNESS JUDGMENTS

Abstract

This paper explores the influence of accountability on adults' resource allocation to hypothetical moral agents. While it has been found that adults tend to behave more generously when reputation is at stake (Piazza & Bering, 2008) due to the desire for positive social evaluation (De Cremer & Sedikides, 2008), this link has been widely established using economic games and the variable of morality has yet to be incorporated. Thus, this study seeks to investigate if there are differences in adults' fairness behaviour towards different moral agents as third-party non-recipients when accountability is manipulated as they have to decide whether to punish or reward the agents using the equity or equality rule. The study was carried out on 160 University students in Singapore, aged 18 to 25 years old, who were tasked to complete a resource allocation task and set of questionnaires after reading a moral scenario. Results show that participants favoured the equity rule regardless of accountability but experienced tainted morality in the accountable condition. These findings suggest that equity is the preferred fairness principle which can be attributed to cultural factors.