Life, as anyone will tell you, is not fair. But how important is fairness?
Hello everyone, Crystal here for DNews.
Let’s play a game, I’m given $100 and I can choose to offer to give some, or none,
to you. If you accept my offer, we both get to keep the money, but if you don’t, we
both get nothing. How much of the 100 would I have to offer you before you’d accept?
$20? 40? How would you feel if I offered you $3? You’d probably leave us both with nothing
just to spite me for being greedy. Right?
This set up is called an Ultimatum Game, and it is used by behavioral scientists to study
the construct of “fairness”. In human adults, any offer lower than 20% of the total
is usually rejected and researchers conclude that this stems from a common expectation
of “fairness”. But how do we decide what’s “fair”?
Our idea of fair changes over time. For children younger than school age, what is fair is usually
what is equal. (When my sister was little, she could never understand why I would get
more of something because I was older) but as we develop, our sense of fairness shifts
to become rooted in merit based reasoning, that’s why in adults it is more common for
higher value individuals be the most rewarded, and researchers at MIT and the University
of Rochester recently proposed that this shift correlates to when we learn to count.
These researchers studied 70 children between the ages of 3 and 12 that belonged to the
Tsimane' tribe in the Amazon. Each child was shown two drawings of identical children.
Then they were told that the children in the drawings were sent to pick bananas, one child
had worked very hard and brought back 18 bananas, and the other picked only 4. The researchers
then gave the participant children an even number of paper cookies and asked them to
distribute the cookies as a reward to the banana pickers. Children that could count,
distributed more reward cookies to the successful banana picker instead of distributing cookies
evenly between the two.
These results were interesting because Tsimane’ children learn to count at varying ages, and
they saw that how these children bestowed a reward and did not correlate with age as
in previous studies. The researchers propose that children may understand the concept of
rewarding greater efforts before they learn to count, but they can't accurately translate
that understanding into an appropriate distribution because they can’t yet represent quantity
with numeric values.
So is “fair” ever “equal”? Ideas of “fair” and equal are present, not just
in humans, but in primates too. A now famous study done in monkeys by Sarah Brosnan and
Frans de Waal shows that when two monkeys, in full view of each other, are asked to perform
an identical task but receive unequal rewards the monkey who receives the lowest reward
reacts strongly and violently to the inequality as, well, any one of us would!
So what does this intrinsic understanding of equality mean in our unequal society? Economists
Michael Norton and Dan Ariely published results of an experimental survey in 2011 that shows
Americans greatly underestimate the level of inequality extant in our own society and
when asked, we even say we would like a much more equal distribution of societal wealth
than both what we have and what we think we have.
However, when Norton and Ariely asked their experimental subjects to design the wealth
distribution of a society that the subjects would be willing to enter at any hierarchical
level, the participants did *not* create a society that was mathematically equal across
all class designations. Implying, that even when tasked with creating a fair and equal
social structure, we’d still like the possibility of getting just a little bit more than everyone
else.
Sometimes, life just isn't fair. one place where unfairness runs wild is in sports! Learn
why subconscious bias can interfere with important calls, in this video.
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