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The ‘irrational’ preference for fairness has attracted increasing attention. Although previous studies have focused on the effects of spitefulness on the evolution of fairness, they did not consider non-monotonic rejections shown in behavioral experiments. In this paper, we introduce a non-monotonic rejection in an evolutionary model of the Ultimatum Game. We propose strategy intervention to study the evolution of fairness in general structured populations. By sequentially adding five strategies into the competition between a fair strategy and a selfish strategy, we arrive at the following conclusions. First, the evolution of fairness is inhibited by altruism, but it is promoted by spitefulness. Second, the non-monotonic rejection helps fairness overcome selfishness. Particularly for group-structured populations, we analytically investigate how fairness, selfishness, altruism, and spitefulness are affected by population size, mutation, and migration in the competition among seven strategies. Our results may provide important insights into understanding the evolutionary origin of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the experimental trade-off between the exercise of control over the actions of the experimental participants and the potential to provide understanding about human behavior. Control is a requirement of the experimental method to produce pertinent and intelligible results for scientific inquiry. But the more control is exercised the more the experimental results are the outcome of economists' actions. Economic experiments must therefore achieve a difficult balance. They must elicit intelligible behavior while ensuring that the actions of those taking part in the experiment are not determined by the design set-up and the rules of the experiment. The paper puts forward criteria for the analysis of the level of participation of experimental subjects in economics experiments and applies them to several experiments to illustrate the relevance of assessing the agency of experimental participants when deriving inferences about human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]