Exploration of tolerance of unfairness under COVID-19 mortality salience and its effect on epidemic development

COVID-19 has brought awareness of the daily threat of death to everyone in the world and provided a natural context for raising widespread awareness of the salience of mortality. Previous researchers have found that mortality salience has rendered proposers more likely to make a fair offer in the dictator and ultimatum game, but there has been no study focusing on the psychological changes in the responders. Study 1 was an exploratory study of the effect of mortality salience on the threshold for acceptance of unfair offers, comparing the effect of unnatural deaths, such as those caused by COVID-19, and that of natural deaths, such as those caused by aging. The results showed that COVID-19 mortality salience could lower the acceptance threshold in responders, thus increasing their tolerance of unfairness, while the mortality salience from aging would not. In Study 2, we established an evolutionary game model to simulate the influences of tolerance of unfairness in allocation of resources on epidemic spread using agent-based modeling. The study compared two societies with different levels of the fear of death, and the results showed that the society with a relatively high death fear would produce more inequality in distribution by increasing the tolerance of unfairness. This ultimately leads to worse pandemic conditions and slower control of the spread in the first stage of the pandemic.