We know when we're being gypped, and we don't like it at all. Research has shown that we have an instinct to punish the unequitable - scientists devised a game where volunteers partnered up, and one partner was given some money to share with the other partner, any way he or she saw fit. The key to the game was, if the other partner rejected the split, nobody got any money. At around an 80% to 20% split, the responding partners tended to get angry at the inequity and make sure the unfair partner didn't get paid, even though logically this meant that both partners "lost." We would rather punish a greedy personality, it seems, than to make a little money ourselves.
The NYTimes posits that this sense of fairness is one of the roots of our humanity. We as a species have benefited because we as individuals learned to squelch behavior that would lead one of us to benefit at the cost of the many. I think it's evident this struggle is far from over, but it is becoming clear that to call us "selfish, greedy, and destructive" and to leave it at that is missing a large part of the picture.
Read more here: Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive via NYTimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment