Fairness Motivations and Procedures of Choice between Lotteries as Revealed through Eye Movements

Eye tracking is used to investigate decision makers’ motivations and procedures in choice problems. Patterns of eye movements in problems where the deliberation process is easily discernable are used to understand the deliberation in other problems. We find that in problems which involve the distribution of income between the participant and another individual, participants who behave selfishly nevertheless take into consideration the size of the payment to the other person. In problems that involve choice between two simple lotteries, eye movements indicate that many participants based their decision on a comparison of prizes and probabilities rather than making an expected utility calculation