Abstract

Fair decision-making is a critical topic in social psychology, yet the conditions under which visual social-presence cues influence fairness remain unclear. Using two online Ultimatum Game studies, the present research examined whether eye cues affect proposers’ allocation behavior and responders’ rejection behavior, and whether dispositional or state public self-awareness serves as a boundary condition. Study 1 adopted a three-factor design covering cue type, dispositional public self-awareness and repeated decision rounds. No consistent cue-related tendency appeared for proposers’ average resource offers, exact equal split choices or responders’ unequal offer rejection. Trait public self-awareness, decision round, and the interaction between each pair of variables showed no meaningful influence on all measured fairness indicators. Study 2 adopted a two-factor design with cue type and experimentally induced state public self-awareness. Among all fairness indicators, only a weak tendency for equal allocation choices differed between cue groups, and this trend went against mainstream predictions of prosocial observation effects. No consistent cue-related tendency existed for average allocation or responders’ rejection choices, and state public self-awareness did not interact with cue type to shape participants’ decisions. Taken together, the whole set of observations shows little consistent support for the watching-eyes effect in online Ultimatum Game contexts.

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