Are Deaf College Students More Sensitive to Unfair Information？

Abstract

Abstract To investigate whether fairness decision among deaf college students is the sameto the normal hearing college students, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how the brain affected when the deaf college students perform the ultimatum gaming task. For the behavioral outcomes, a main effect of proposal type was found for both deaf and normal hearing college students, the more unfair of the offer, the lower of acceptance rate have, which indicated that the deaf college students have the same unfairness aversion and fair decision-making as normal hearing college students at the behavioral level. The ERPs results revealed there was a significant interaction between group and proposal type at the early stage (N1). Interestingly, only in the deaf college group, the mean wave amplitude of N1 induced by moderately and very unfair offers were significantly greater than that of fair offers. In addition, we found that the deaf college students had smaller amplitudes on P2 and P3 than normal hearing college students, which showed the deaf college students are more strongly motivated to be fair. Based on these, we should provide more fairness information and attention to the mental health of the deaf people.