When exactly is something either fair or unfair? Whether the topic is taxation, pay and bonuses, government benefits, crime and punishment, or almost anything else, we just can’t seem to agree.
The reason, it turns out, is that our intuitions about these matters are shaped not only by culture and upbringing but also by our individual natures. Fairness isn’t an objective standard but a subjective cocktail of what social scientists call norms; and people embrace or reject these norms according to unique personality traits. That’s the upshot of new research by Milan Andrejevic, Luke Smillie, Daniel Feuerriegel, William Turner, Simon Laham and Stefan Bode at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences in Australia.
To psychologists, personality is defined as a mixture of five traits: relative extroversion or introversion, openness to new ideas and experiences, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism (that is, a proclivity toward anxiety, crankiness and other negative emotions). That personality influences notions of fairness shouldn’t be surprising. Previous research has already shown that it shapes our feelings about authority, loyalty, purity and much else – even our resilience when coping with lockdowns or other setbacks.
Perceptions of fairness break down into competing values. The norm of equality, for example, says that when people share, everyone should get the same. The norm of equity suggests that people should get what they deserve. That of reciprocity implies that they should receive roughly what they’ve given. That of generosity sees virtue in being more forthcoming than necessary, and so on.
Self-interest prejudices our minds as we tussle with these norms. For instance, whether we consider the marginal tax rate fair usually depends at least in part on the tax bracket we find ourselves in. But Andrejevic and his team were interested in the role of personality in shaping our sense of fairness – without the intrusion of self-interest.