Sense of Fairness Affects Outlook, Decisions

One classic way to study fairness is an experiment known as "the ultimatum game." The game involves one person offering to divide a sum of money, and the second person deciding whether to accept or reject the deal.

If the sum is $100, for example, the first person might offer to give away $25 and keep $75 for himself. If the second person agrees, the money is divided accordingly. But if the second person rejects the deal, neither one gets anything.

If people cared only about absolute rewards, then Person B ought to accept whatever Person A offers, because getting even $1 is better than nothing. But experiments show that many people will reject the deal if they feel the first person is dividing the money unfairly.

Such thinking may be universal. In a 2006 paper published in the journal Science, Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary psychologist who is now at the University of British Columbia, found that people in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Ecuador, Bolivia, Siberia, Papua New Guinea and Fiji all placed a very high premium on being treated fairly.

In every case, people were willing to forgo money in order to keep someone else from dividing it unfairly. Henrich and his colleagues argued that this apparently universal impulse suggested an evolutionary mechanism; the willingness to make personal sacrifices to punish unfair people, they argued, helps make fairness the norm. And over time, a species that enforces fairness might be more successful than a species that allows or encourages disparities. An evolutionary mechanism might also explain why people have very forceful reactions to unfairness -- not merely disappointment but rage.

"When you are treated unfairly or disrespectfully, the organization is excluding you from being a real member of the community," Leiter said. "There is something about that that makes people feel really insecure.

"When loyal employees are treated in a way that is not fair, they feel betrayed in a very deep, emotional way," Leiter added. "When you do a lot of work you get tired, but it does not have the same emotional impact as being treated unfairly."