Context: What do people do when they find themselves the victim or benefactor of an unfair competition? Furthermore, do individual differences in personality, specifically those that have been discussed in the context of greedy and manipulative behavior (i.e., maladaptive personality traits) moderate these associations? To this point, few studies can answer these questions. Objective: The goal of this dissertation was to better understand how competition and fairness affect people's behavior in situations in which resource allocation is the primary concern and to also understand whether individual differences in maladaptive personality traits account for variation in responses to these situations. Design, Setting, and Participants: 893 college undergraduates completed these studies for course credit or extra credit. Participants first completed a series of demographic and personality questionnaires then engaged in a computerized version of an economic decision-making game where they bargained over points (prize entries) with a group of ostensible opponents. The games were either competitive (participants answered math questions quickly for a chance to make a proposal of points) or non-competitive (the computer decided the proposer randomly) and either allowed participants the choice of accepting/rejecting proposals (i.e., "the Ultimatum game") or to forced them to accept proposals (i.e., "the Dictator game"). Furthermore, within the competitive games, competition was manipulated to be either fair (opponents had questions of equal difficulty) or unfair (one opponent had an advantage). Main Outcome Measures: The outcomes of interest were participants' proposals of points made to their ostensible opponents (in both Ultimatum and Dictator variants of the game) and their acceptance rates of offers made to them by their ostensible opponent (in Ultimatum variants only). Results: Competition increased participants' acceptance of unfair (1 or 2 point) offers (MNon = .27, MComp.= .35; d = .24) and decreased proposals of points (MComp = 2.89, MNon = 3.45; d = .47). Manipulating the fairness of the competition resulted in increased acceptance rates of unfair offers such that they were significantly higher when participants lost at an advantage (M =.38) than when the competition was fair (M = .35; d = .07) or they lost at a disadvantage (M = .33; d = .13). Manipulating fairness also had an effect on participants' proposals such that they offered more points to their opponents when they won at an advantage (M = 3.05) and less when they won at a disadvantage (M = 2.72). Finally, there was little evidence of associations between individual differences in maladaptive personality traits and acceptance rates or proposals. Likewise, there was little evidence to suggest that these associations were moderated by game type (i.e., Ultimatum vs. Dictator). Conclusions: The presence of competition appears to change the norm of what constitutes a fair distribution of resources from one of equality (everyone gets an equal share) to one of equity (some parties deserve more) as demonstrated by higher acceptance rates of unfair proposals and lower proposals made in competitive versus non-competitive games. Furthermore, people are somewhat sensitive to the procedural injustice (i.e., fairness) of competition and behave in a manner that suggests they are attempting to redress an unfair advantage by offering more of the resource when it was won unfairly and rejecting small proposals of the resource from individuals who may be exploiting the unfairness of the situation. Last, there was little evidence to suggest that individual differences in personality are predictive of behavior in these games or that the presence/absence of rejection moderates associations between personality attributes and game behavior.
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