Accountability and righteousness

Winners behaviors toward losers are important determinants for evolution of fairness and inequality in societies. However, little is known about how inequality arises from the status quo of equality and winners righteously act to losers. This research considers the accountability, investigating the question “how asking people to be accountable for decisions influence their behaviors toward losers as they are winners by chance?†and the hypothesis “being accountable induces winners to behave righteously to losers.†We institute the control winner’s righteousness game (WRG) in a group of three subjects with equal endowments and conduct a laboratory experiment with 297 subjects, consisting of three steps. First, each subject decides how much to take endowments from losers as she is a winner. Second, a lottery determines whether she becomes a winner or a loser. Third, she takes the endowment from each loser following her decisions in the 1st step if she is a winner. Otherwise, her endowment shall be taken by each winner. Two additional treatments are prepared: (i) intragenerational accountability (IAA) and (ii) intergenerational accountability (IRA). Every subject is asked to be accountable for her “take†decisions, providing the reasons and advice to unknown others that will play WRG later as the same generation in IAA and as the subsequent generations with a generational lineup in IRA. Results indicate that IAA and IRA affect subjects not to take endowments from losers as compared to the control, and the “take†reduction in IRA is twice as much as that in IAA. Overall, when people are held accountable for their decisions across generations they righteously behave to enhance both intragenerational and intergenerational fairness.