A new study co-authored by McGill University researchers suggests people can be taught to reject unfair advantages.
"We often benefit personally from an unequal distribution of resources, a phenomenon known as advantageous inequity - for example, receiving a higher salary than a colleague with the identical role," said senior author Ross Otto, a psychology professor. "Here we ask whether people can learn to punish advantageous inequity merely by observing the inequity-averse preferences of another person."
Published in eLife, the study found that participants became more willing to reject unfairly favourable offers after observing another person consistently do so.
"People can learn to punish advantageous inequity even when it might come at a cost to themselves," Otto said.
The finding is unexpected for two reasons.
First, while it was previously established that people reliably reject unfair offers that disadvantage them, they tend to accept situations that are unfairly to their benefit. Before this study, it was unclear whether a preference for fairness in both situations disadvantageuous and advantageous inequity could be learned.
Second, the way people appear to learn this preference goes beyond simple habit formation.
"The way people seem to be learning these preferences from others involves taking the perspective of another person and implementing these preferences on their own behalf," Otto said, "rather than learning of simple stimulus-response associations; what we often term reinforcement learning'."
The Ultimatum Game
The researchers used a modified version of the Ultimatum Game, a standard economic experiment in which one player proposes how to split money, and the other can accept or reject the offer. Rejecting an unfair split means neither player gets anything.
Participants first played the game on their own. They then entered a learning phase in which they made accept-or-reject decisions on behalf of another player, called the "Teacher." After each decision, they were shown whether the Teacher would have preferred to spurn the offer.
In one scenario, the Teacher rejected both disadvantageous and advantageous unfair offers. In another, the Teacher rejected only disadvantageous ones. Later, participants again played for themselves.
"In a first experiment, we demonstrate that people can acquire aversion to advantageous inequity vicariously through observation of the Teacher's preferences," the researchers wrote. "In a second experiment, we replicate this finding and further demonstrate that people are able [to] generalize this sort of vicarious learning across different contexts."
The researchers say these findings matter beyond the lab.
"If we want to understand how to foster egalitarian norms in society these experiments suggest one possible way to do this is by a process of conformity - that is, modelling the observed preferences of another with strong moral preferences," Otto said.
About the study
"Advantageous and disadvantageous inequality aversion can be taught through learning of others' preferences," by Shen Zhang, Oriel FeldmanHall, Sébastian Hétu, and Ross Otto was published in eLife.
This work was funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologies, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the European Research Council
