ABSTRACT
This chapter reports some experiments investigating the influence of positive and negative affect on moral decisions involving the allocation of resources to ourselves vs others, using strategic games such as the dictator game and the ultimatum game. The ethical conflict between selfishness versus fairness has been a major issue for religious and moral philosophers since time immemorial. Economic games offer a reliable and valid method to study interpersonal strategies involving ethical conflicts, such as fairness, selfishness, trust and cooperation. In zero-sum situations such as the dictator game and the ultimatum game, earnings can only be maximized by keeping as much of the resource as possible. Affect can also influence processing tendencies, that is, how people process social information. Early work suggested that positive affect promotes a more superficial and lazy information-processing style, while negative affect improves attention and processing vigilance. Finally it focuses selfishness versus fairness one of the most important and ubiquitous ethical conflicts people face in interpersonal situations.
