New study reveals how depression twists our perception of fairness

People experiencing symptoms of depression often view social situations differently than others. A recent study found that individuals with depressive symptoms are more likely to perceive unfair financial offers as fair, but only if they consider themselves to have a high social standing. The research was published in the journal PLOS One.

Depression involves more than just a persistently low mood or a loss of interest in daily activities. It frequently brings about cognitive distortions, which are biased ways of thinking that negatively alter how a person perceives themselves and the world around them. These mental filters can change how someone evaluates risk, assesses their personal value, and judges the intentions of others in everyday social exchanges.

Researchers often use a behavioral economics task called the Ultimatum Game to study how people process fairness. In a typical version of this game, one person is given a sum of money and proposes how to divide it with a second person. The second person then decides whether to accept or reject the offer.

If the responder accepts the deal, both players keep their respective shares of the money. If they reject the offer, the money is forfeited, and neither player receives anything.

From a purely logical standpoint, a responder should accept any offer greater than zero, since walking away with a small amount of money is better than walking away with nothing. However, human behavior rarely follows strict economic logic.

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Typically, people will reject highly uneven splits, such as an offer where the proposer keeps 90 percent of the money and offers only 10 percent to the responder. Participants are often willing to sacrifice their own financial gain to punish the other player for violating social norms of fairness.

This behavior, known as altruistic punishment, relies heavily on a person’s emotional state and their cognitive ability to recognize a situation as inequitable. Studies show that facing an unfair offer triggers negative emotions and activates brain regions associated with conflict and disgust.

Psychology researcher Yin Hanmo of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and a team of colleagues wanted to understand exactly how depression influences these decisions. Previous studies on depression and the Ultimatum Game have yielded conflicting results. Some research indicates that depressed individuals reject more offers due to heightened negative emotions, while other studies show they reject fewer offers.

The researchers suspected that a person’s subjective socioeconomic status might explain the discrepancy. Subjective socioeconomic status refers to how an individual views their own rank in society, regardless of their actual income or education level.

To test this idea, Hanmo and the research team recruited 274 university students in China and Malaysia. The participants completed a standardized questionnaire designed to measure the frequency of depressive symptoms over the past week, such as feeling sad, experiencing restless sleep, or struggling to get going.

The students also completed a widely used assessment to gauge their subjective socioeconomic status. They looked at an image of a 10-rung ladder representing where people stand in society. The top rungs represented people with the most money, most education, and best jobs. Participants selected the rung that best matched their own perceived position.

Next, the participants played a modified, paper-based version of the Ultimatum Game. They received a list of 18 proposed monetary splits from anonymous partners. Some of the offers were equal, splitting the money evenly down the middle, while other offers were highly skewed in favor of the proposer.

For each proposed split, the participants had to choose whether to accept or reject the deal. They also rated the perceived fairness of each offer on a scale from one to seven, with one being very unfair and seven being very fair.

The researchers found that depressive symptoms alone did not directly dictate how often a participant rejected an uneven offer. Instead, the effects of depression depended heavily on a participant’s self-reported social standing.

Among individuals who ranked themselves high on the social ladder, having higher levels of depression was associated with viewing unequal offers as more fair. Because these individuals perceived the bad deals as relatively fair, they were subsequently less likely to reject them.

This pattern did not appear among participants who placed themselves lower on the social ladder. For these individuals, experiencing depressive symptoms did not alter their perception of unequal offers. Consequently, their likelihood of rejecting a bad deal remained unchanged regardless of their depression levels.

The researchers suggest that differing baseline expectations may drive this divergence. People who feel they have a high social status generally expect to be treated equitably and with respect. When they face a highly unequal financial offer, the gap between their expectations and reality creates psychological friction.

The authors propose that individuals with both high social standing and depressive symptoms might subconsciously cope with this friction by rationalizing the bad offer. By mentally reframing the unequal split as acceptable, they can avoid the emotional distress of acknowledging unfair treatment. This cognitive reappraisal acts as a defense mechanism, reducing immediate discomfort but ultimately leading to skewed financial decisions.

In contrast, people who view themselves as lower on the social ladder may frequently encounter systemic disadvantages and social inequality. Because they do not expect strict equity in the same way, an unequal offer does not trigger the same intense psychological conflict. As a result, depression does not force them to artificially adjust their perception of fairness to cope with the situation.

The current study focused on university students experiencing varying levels of depressive symptoms, rather than patients clinically diagnosed with a major depressive disorder. Studies involving clinical populations have occasionally found that severe depression leads to higher rejection rates in the Ultimatum Game. The regulatory mental strategies that cause people to rationalize bad offers might break down as depressive symptoms become more severe, leaving patients overly sensitive to unfairness.

Additionally, the researchers measured subjective social standing rather than objective financial metrics like household income or accumulated wealth. Because university students typically share similar educational environments and do not yet have established careers, their sense of social status might function differently than it would in older adults in the workforce.

Future studies will need to test whether objective income levels produce similar effects on financial decision-making. Researchers also hope to measure participants’ baseline expectations of fairness directly to confirm whether expectation violations drive these behavioral shifts.

The study, “Subjective socioeconomic status moderates depression’s impact on fairness perception in the ultimatum game: A moderated mediation model,” was authored by Yin Hanmo, Rozainee Khairudin, Shi Yixin, Zhang Xi, Chen Xinyu, Syakirien Yusoff, and Nasrudin Subhi.