Adolescent-Adult Interactions and Culture in the Ultimatum Game

We report on ultimatum game experiments conducted with same-age as well as mixed-age groups of Asian adolescents and adults. The findings indicate that compared with adults, adolescents make significantly larger offers to adult responders and are less likely to reject. Chinese subjects are found to make smaller offers than non-Chinese Asian subjects, but are no more likely to reject. The findings are explained with reference to theories of childhood development and (culture-specific) socialisation.