Fairness Norms Research Articles

Ingroup bias does not influence inequity aversion in children.

Ingroup favoritism influences third-party norm enforcement: Third-party punishers are more lenient when an ingroup member has been unfair. By contrast, in 2-party contexts, where punishers are the victims of unfairness, group bias effects are absent or inconsistent. Thus, group bias appears to be particularly influential when enforcing fairness among others, but less so when protecting oneself from unfairness. This would have implications for theories of how cooperation and intergroup cognition interact, but a more direct empirical test is lacking. To this end, developmental data are particularly useful as they can tell us whether and if so how group bias and fairness norm enforcement are related from their first emergence. Using a minimal groups manipulation, we induced ingroup bias in 6- to 9-year-olds and tested their willingness to reject disadvantageous (more for you) and advantageous (more for me) resource allocations when paired with in- and outgroup members. Group bias did not affect children's rejections of unfair allocations, although they reported that it was worse when an outgroup member had more. Our findings suggest that ingroup bias does not influence children's costly endorsement of equality, indicating that children perceive the equality norm to be indiscriminate and enforceable across group boundaries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Pursuing Over-Criminalization at the Expense of Islamic Law

In a short essay, Adnan A. Zulfiqar takes a more critical approach to aspects of Brunei’s criminal laws that have garnered less attention but that he finds more troubling. The international community has, rightly in his view, protested against and condemned the law’s potential violations of human rights norms against torture and individual freedom. Most condemnations have focused on provisions for capital punishment, whipping, and amputation for the new Code’s crimes of liwāṭ (sodomy), zinā (unlawful sexual intercourse between heterosexuals), and theft. But little attention has been paid to the Code’s departures from “classical Islamic law’s substantive and procedural constraints” thus allowing legislators and prosecutors to “criminalize more conduct.” For example, the Code permits punishment of offenders who lack legal capacity, requires four eyewitnesses to prove rape, and prosecutes beliefs through punishing attempted apostasy. For these reasons, despite the procedural protections and heightened standards of doubt jurisprudence to which Mohamed and Müller point, the new Code entails many other provisions that signal the need for greater caution and perhaps further modification. Zulfiqar argues that Brunei codified Islamic criminal law in a way that creates novel crimes and disregards defendant rights, thus diverging from norms of fairness and cultural accommodation present in the precedents and mores of the very Islamic system which it seeks to reinterpret for its society today.

The cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying norm-enforcement behaviors under social observation.

Abundant evidence has revealed that social observation could enhance people's norm-enforcement behaviors to norm violators. However, whether such enhancement is strategically reputation-based without changes on awareness of social norms or it is accompanied with strengthened perception of norm violations remains unclear. We aimed to test these two hypotheses using a modified Ultimatum Game (UG). Participants played the UG as responders in the fMRI scanner after being instructed the rules of the game and how the observers monitored their performances during the task. Behavioral results showed that unfair offers were perceived more unfair (decreased fairness ratings) and rejected more often under the condition with social observation than that without observation (the control condition). The changes in fairness ratings predicted the increase of rejection rates between two conditions, which provided more evidence for the latter hypothesis. Neural results demonstrated that right insula and anterior cingulate cortex associated with processing norm violations and/or negative emotions were more activated in response to unfair treatments under social observation relative to the control condition. Furthermore, bilateral anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and right amygdala (an emotional processing structure) showed increased activations with the reduction of fairness ratings under social observation. Besides, compared to the control condition, rejecting unfair trials under social observation induced more left anterior insula activation. These findings indicated that the increase of norm-enforcement behaviors in the UG under social observation was more than a behavioral strategy for social desirability, but a result of enhanced sensitivity to fairness norm violations and unfairness-related negative feelings.

The moral economy of work: Demanding jobs and deserving money in South Africa

Why would the long-term unemployed poor continue to insist that wage labour must remain the key path to income – even in a place like South Africa, with endemic structural unemployment and spiralling inequality? This paper explores this puzzle using in-depth qualitative data from inner-city Johannesburg to unravel the ways in which people’s economic expectations are embedded in moral beliefs that equate effort and labour with deservingness and income. To make sense of such moral logics and discourses, this paper theorizes them as part of a cohesive moral economy. This shared moral economy illuminates the means though which norms of fairness, deservingness and aspiration underpin attitudes about redistribution, cash and labour, and thus influence both support and resistance to particular political agendas around radical redistributory economic reform.

How intergroup relation moderates group bias in Third-Party Punishment

Two experiments were conducted to investigate how intergroup relation moderates group bias in Third-Party Punishment (TPP) of selfishness. Participants competed or cooperated with the other group and then performed a TPP task in which they could reduce an allocator's benefits after paying a low cost (paying 1/3 unit deducts 1 unit of the allocator in Experiment 1, n = 76) or a high cost (paying 1 unit deducts 1 unit of the allocator in Experiment 2, n = 81). The results supported the “mere-preference hypothesis” of group bias, showing that people were more likely to tolerate their ingroups while punishing outgroups more harshly. Furthermore, when the cost was low, competition increased people's punishment toward outgroups' selfishness but not toward ingroup members, thus enlarging the group bias. When the cost was high, however, this effect disappeared, indicating that people consider a “cost-to-impact ratio” when selectively enforcing the fairness norm in intergroup conflicts. Our findings suggest how intergroup relation and cost-benefit analysis interact together to influence the group bias in TPP, providing insights into mechanisms underlying the maintenance of fairness norms and decision-making in a group context.

The normative status of friendship: Do young children enforce sharing with friends and appreciate reasonable partiality?

Contemporary moral philosophy stresses the idea of reasonable partiality. This concept proposes that close relationships carry a normative obligation to be partial toward another person. This study explored in two experiments whether 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 185) enforce partiality toward friends from third parties (Experiment 1) and how they prioritize a norm of equality and interpersonal obligations toward friends (Experiment 2). Children were presented with protagonists who could distribute resources between a friend and a disliked peer. One protagonist complied with a norm of partiality by allocating more resources to his friend, whereas the other protagonist either behaved in the opposite way (Experiment 1) or distributed resources equally (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, children enforced partiality by protesting against the protagonist who gave more to the disliked peer and by selectively affirming the protagonist who gave more to the friend. Yet, in Experiment 2, children showed stronger enforcement of a norm of equal sharing than partiality toward the friend. The study demonstrates how young children deal with normative demands in the context of friendship. At the same time, it suggests that fairness norms are given priority. Overall, our study demonstrates how young children handle normative demands and interpersonal responsibilities.

Influence of self-relevance on moral decision-making under reputational loss risk: An ERP study

The way people make decisions that have direct consequences to the self and others forms the moral foundation of human society. Although humans are at times impacted by social fairness norms and cooperation, economists have supposed that humans generally prioritize maximizing their own self-interest over others’. Recent psychological studies have shown people to be hyperaltruistic in social decisions, such as moral decision-making. Moral decision-making typically involves a trade-off between maintaining personal benefits and preventing harm to others. Previous human brain imaging studies have found similarities in neural activation between moral and economic decision-making under risk situations. Meanwhile, the way that people balance the gains and losses between themselves and others under social risk situations, especially the underlying neural mechanism, remains unclear. Reputational concern is a potentially important factor during human moral decision-making; that is, people are extremely concerned about how others perceive their behavior, which has a significant impact on prosocial behavior and motivation. Thus, this event-realted potential (ERP) study used the dilemma scenario-priming paradigm to explore how both self-relevance and reputational loss risk interact with behavioral and neural responses during moral decision-making. Participants were instructed to accomplish a moral decision-making task under reputational loss risk situations. Specifically, the participants needed to decide whether they were willing to sacrifice their own interests to help a protagonist (friend, acquaintance, or stranger) facing dilemmas of reputational loss risk (low to high risk). In addition to behavioral data and ERP analyses, we conducted spectral analysis to examine the neural oscillations underlying moral decision-making. Behavioral results showed that under low risk of reputational loss conditions, participants demonstrated a differential altruistic tendency, indicating that participants made more helping choices and subsequently reported weaker unpleasant experiences toward friends compared with acquaintances and strangers. Nonetheless, the participants showed an obvious “acquaintance effect”, suggesting that participants took longer time to make decisions and experienced stronger displeasure. Electrophysiological results revealed that moral decision-making toward acquaintances under low reputational loss risk conditions also elicited larger P260-N2-LPP (300–450 ms) effects during emotional and cognitive processing, compared with friends and strangers. Spectral analysis results showed that the delta- (1–4 Hz, 200–300 ms) and alpha-band powers (8–13 Hz, 300–600 ms) for moral decision-making toward acquaintances were significantly larger compared with the case for friends and strangers, under low risk of reputational loss conditions. However, these effects of all indices weakened or disappeared under high risk of reputational loss conditions. The present results suggested that the moral principles that guide interpersonal moral decision-making can best be described as egoistically biased altruism, and that uncertainty in interpersonal relationships brings emotional and cognitive burden to moral decision-making. Moreover, reputational concerns may play a crucial role in limiting selfish tendencies and eliminating uncertainties.

In-group favoritism or the black sheep effect? Group bias of fairness norm enforcement during economic games

In-group favoritism or the black sheep effect? Group bias of fairness norm enforcement during economic games

Worker Empowerment and Subjective Evaluation: On Building an Effective Conflict Culture

Although conflicts typically lead to a waste of resources, organizations may still benefit from a corporate culture that tolerates or even encourages conflicts. The reason is that coordinated conflicts may help to enforce informal contracts and foster cooperation. In this paper we report results of a series of laboratory experiments designed to explore whether and under what conditions an efficiency-enhancing conflict culture can emerge. Using a principal-worker setup with subjective performance evaluation, we show that establishing a functional conflict culture is a delicate matter. If conflicts are encouraged in a careless, hands-off manner, the destructive side of conflicts is likely to dominate. To be successful a conflict culture requires a careful management of fairness norms. In our experiment we find that conflicts have positive net effects on efficiency only if an explicit code of conduct is established and conflicts are institutionalized through a grievance process. Thus, providing workers with more power may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for improving productivity when performance evaluations are subjective. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Mediating role of attenuated physiological arousal on the association between psychopathic traits and fairness norm violation

The low-fear model of primary psychopathy has been supported by empirical findings such as attenuated physiological arousal in anticipation of threatening stimuli. The somatic marker hypothesis proposes that salient changes in the bodily state are processed as signals of whether a situation is good or bad and guide an individual to avoid potential adverse consequences. The present study aimed to elucidate the role that attenuated physiological arousal plays in the relationship between primary psychopathy and fairness norm violations both under the threat of punishment and under no potential for punishment. Primary psychopathy was associated with an attenuated skin conductance response prior to the choice of unfair monetary offers to another person, regardless of the potential for punishment. Attenuated skin conductance mediated the association between primary psychopathy and the choice of an unfair offer, especially in the no-punishment condition. However, in the punishment condition, primary psychopathy significantly predicted the choice of unfair offers even after controlling for the magnitude of skin conductance. The bodily response may have only a marginal effect on interpersonal decision-making under a threat of punishment. The present results suggest that the low-fear account of social norm violations as a function of primary psychopathy should be re-discussed.

I’ll make you an offer you can refuse: How socially sensitive is the MFN?

ABSTRACTMedial frontal negativity (MFN) is an event-related potential thought to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex. It is evoked by outcomes being worse than expected, such as when presented with unfair economic proposals during the Ultimatum Game (UG). This could mean the MFN indexes a social-emotional response, as commonly suggested in accounts that relate it to a violation of a social norm of fairness. To examine the link between MFN and norm violation, we designed an EEG experiment with participants acting as representatives in an UG. Participants responded either as themselves, or as representatives of two charities. Of these, a norm-compatible charity conformed to the participant’s values, while the norm-incompatible charity contrasted to them. The behavioral results showed that norm-incompatible representation reversed behavior, with almost all fair offers being declined. The MFN, however, was unaffected by the norm representation, with unfair offers consistently evoking MFNs across conditions. We furthermore replicated the curious finding that unexpectedly generous offers evoke as much MFN as unfair offers. Thus, the MFN is not nearly as sensitive to higher-order social-emotional processes as commonly assumed. Instead, the perceived inequality that drives the MFN likely reflects a rational, probabilistic process.

Fairness norm violations in anti-social psychopathic offenders in a repeated trust game

Psychopathic offenders have a high propensity to violate social norms, as indicated for instance by their widespread lying and cheating behaviour. The reasons for their norm violations are not well understood, though, as they are able to recognise norms in a given situation and also punish norm violators. In this study, we investigated whether psychopathic offenders would violate fairness norms during a repeated trust game because of increased profit-maximising concerns. We measured back-transfer decisions in the repeated trust game, and affective arousal by means of skin conductance responses (SCR) in violent offenders with varying degrees of psychopathy, and non-offenders with low-trait psychopathy. Psychopathy in offenders was measured with the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). In the task, a participant and an interaction partner entrusted each other money for multiple rounds with the goal to earn as much money as possible. Fairness norm violations were positively associated with Factor 2 scores (the lifestyle/anti-social psychopathy subscale) of the PCL-R, but this was not accompanied by clear profit-maximising behaviour. In addition, anticipatory arousal to self-advantageous decisions was higher in all offenders, independent of their degree of psychopathy, compared with non-offenders. The results of our study widen our understanding of social decision-making in psychopathy. They also suggest treatment possibilities in offenders scoring high on Factor 2, targeting empathic concern and related prosocial intentions to overcome norm-violating behaviour.

Neural signatures of cooperation enforcement and violation: a coordinate-based meta-analysis.

The social norms of fairness and reciprocity are fundamental to cooperation and constitute core behavioral principles. Warm glow theory suggests that cooperative behavior is driven by positive emotions, whereas inequity aversion theory proposes that cooperative behavior is necessary to avoid negative feelings. However, the precise characteristics underlying the enforcement (fairness or reciprocity) and violation (unfairness or betrayal) of cooperation remain elusive. Moreover, whether the neural mechanism of cooperation as a partner or a spectator is the same remains unclear. To resolve the above issues, we summarized the findings of human cooperation neuroimaging studies through a meta-analysis. Based on our results, cooperation enforcement activates reward-related brain areas, such as the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex, only during other-cooperation. In contrast, cooperation violation is associated with the negative emotion-related insula in both self- and other-noncooperation. Thus, people expect others to cooperate rather than themselves; however, people are disgusted when cooperation is violated by themselves or others. Taken together, cooperative behavior might be mainly driven by a process designed to avoid negative emotion, which supports the inequity aversion theory but not the warm glow theory, thereby improving our understanding of cooperation theory.

The effect of inequality in stakes on sharing behavior: Evidence from an experimental study

This study aims to test an aspect of inequality aversion in sharing behavior. We designed a dictator game to examine whether the sharing behavior of a dictator could be affected by the amounts allocated to other dictators. We find that dictators tended to transfer less money to recipients if they knew that other dictators received much more than they did. However, dictators did not share more money if they were given a relatively larger grant than others. This suggests that self-serving fairness norms influence individuals’ sharing behavior.

Individual Differences in Theory of Mind Predict Inequity Aversion in Children.

Early in human development, children react negatively to receiving less than others, and only later do they show a similar aversion to receiving more. We tested whether theory of mind (ToM) can account for this developmental shift we see in middle childhood. We conducted a face-to-face fairness task that involved a ToM manipulation, measured individual differences in ToM, and collected parent-ratings of children's empathy, a construct related to ToM. We find that greater ToM capacities lead to more rejections of unequal offers, regardless of the direction of inequality, demonstrating that children with greater ToM are more likely to engage in costly compliance with fairness norms. Moreover, drawing attention to mental states sufficiently elicits aversion to advantageous inequity in younger children. These findings contribute to our growing understanding that people's concerns for fairness rely not just on their own thoughts and beliefs but on the thoughts, beliefs, and expectations of others.

Aligning taxes and spending: theory and experimental evidence

AbstractUnder what circumstances will members of the public hold positive attitudes toward new or higher taxes? While some scholars have posited that the practice of “earmarking” – designating tax revenues for a particular purpose – can increase support for taxes, the existing literature has not identified the conditions under which earmarking will prove effective in this regard. Here, we draw upon previous research on consumer behavior to hypothesize that support for earmarked taxes will be stronger when such taxes satisfy the criterion of “source–use alignment” (i.e., when the connection between the revenue source and the use for which those revenues are earmarked accords with familiar consumer fairness norms). Evidence in support of this hypothesis comes from two experiments on a sample of US residents matched to Census data, in which subjects were randomly assigned to read descriptions of hypothetical earmarked taxes with varying levels of alignment. Individuals consistently expressed stronger support for earmarked taxes that achieved source–use alignment as compared to earmarked taxes that did not satisfy the source–use alignment criterion. Our theory and results not only help to explain why some earmarked taxes are more popular than others, but also suggest a means for increasing public support for taxes.

Retaliation, Remedies, and Contracts

AbstractContracts commit individuals to a future course of action and create feelings of entitlement on the parties. In a contractual gap, parties’ duties and rights are not univocal, and while promisors will often feel entitled to breach, promisees will feel entitled to receive the promised performance. This divergence leads to disputes, aggrievement, and retaliatory behavior whenever one of the parties feels shortchanged. Remedies for breach are then apt not only to induce performance by promisors, but also to minimize promisees’ aggrievement, reduce retaliation, and thereby keep the peace in society. This article reports results from an experiment that investigates under what circumstances promisees retaliate to breach and to what extent expectation damages fulfill the function of crowding out retaliatory behavior. It reveals how norms of fairness play a fundamental role in shaping parties’ reactions to breach, as promisees did not punish any violation of a prior agreement. They rather punished breach when the promisor profited from it, and the outcome was an unfair distribution of the gains from trade. Neither loss of expectancy nor the inefficiency of the result induced retaliation. Expectation damages successfully crowded out retaliation by disappointed promisees, and thereby avoided high welfare losses from decentralized forms of punishment of perceived wrongs.

The Ultimatum Game: An Introduction to Quantitative Literacy in a Social Justice Context

The Ultimatum Game is a two-person, multiple-strategy game widely used in the experimental social sciences to demonstrate the human propensity for costly punishment in response to inequitable treatment. The game serves to provide quantitative evidence for a diversity of fairness norms across cultures. The play of the game and its interpretation offer nuanced views of the nature and importance of quantitative literacy. Its use in a writing seminar connecting quantitative literacy and social justice is described.

Od-Kantować Rawlsa: ewolucyjne uzasadnienie teorii sprawiedliwości w ujęciu Kena Binmore’a

De-Kanting Rawls: evolutionary justifcation of the theory of justice by Ken Binmore:
 The article discusses the criticism of John Rawls’s theory of justice formulated by Ken Binmore. Binmore criticizes Rawls in his work for inadequate justifcation of fairness norms. In
 his opinion, their proper justifcation requires the rejection of Kant’s “metaphysics” in favor
 of Hume’s empiricism. To explain how fairness norms actually work, one must frst provide
 a convincing account of evolutionary processes that could lead to such norms being encoded
 in our genome. Secondly, it should be explained how this biological mechanism interacts with
 our cultural heritage and generates a selection of balance points in games that describe our
 social interactions.

Managing Wages: Fairness Norms of Low- and High-Performing Team Members

Services are often provided by groups. The question of remuneration arises both at the group level and for each individual group member. We examine the question of how relative pay should be designed within the group if all group members are to regard the payment scheme as fair. We use a three-step laboratory experiment to compare which fairness norms are chosen by high-performing and low-performing group members. It turns out that both types of group members prefer the performance pay principle. Support for equal pay is negligible. However, the low performers use their bargaining power to improve their position, but without deviating from the performance principle substantially. A random influence on the performance of the players does not change the results.