Thursday, April 26, 2007
Inequality and the Perception of Fairness
I have found this link this morning.
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/04/inequality_and_perceptions_of.php
It is a blog and there are two interesing ideas and I have written my comment to it, and I also post my comment here, but you may want to read what made me write my comment.
Monkeys and their fairness or just only negotiating behavior??
Well, both can bee seen, the reaction occurs in context, and we, as well as monkeys are multi-level thinker: So both examples are correct. There is one truth about reactions and information and context.
Just consider the caser of a marriage swindler, he says how much he loves a woman, maybe he does a bit, but his goal is to get her money. Now take a man ho really loves that woman, he also says he loves her.
So you have two extremely similar behavioral expressions but they mean completely something different. They are differently motivated.
The same is with the monkeys: they would perform two extremely similar behavioral actions but the trigger for this action would be different. Once it is fairness and in the second situation it is the rejection of lower quality offer. But the displayed action is the same, or nearly the same.
Another example in humans, just consider a person entering a room a greeting everybody. And then comes the second person and also greets everybody. Where is the difference? Well, one person greets because this person loves people and likes to get into contact with them and respect them. The other person does not like people but was severely taught by mother to greet anytime when entering a room and if not greeting mother applied some kind of punishment. You have the same or nearly the same behavior displayed by the two persons but the motivation was different.
If you properly watch the behavior of people and animals you will find many other examples where the same behavior means slightly or severely different motivation, and thus also different explanation of such behavior.
The experiment with $10 and offering $5 to the other one is extremely narrow experiment, as there is no other contextual information, which is not usually true in real life. People live in groups and so they have always some other additional information, or they ask for some other additional information.
Imagine following example: you want to get something repaired in your home so you ask two or three experts to make you an offer, but this is not enough you go around and ask in your neighborhood how these experts accomplished their tasks. So solely the price is not enough,, you need the context of quality of work, you need references, you need more contextual information.
Back to our $-experiment and real life. If in real life I would be asked to divide ten bucks between me an the other, there were many other aspect also important. If the person is really a good on I can trust, and the person already has helped me many times, so I offer $6 for the person and only $4 for myself, and opposite, if the person has proved unreliable and there is a danger of being hurt by that person I would offer very little, maybe only two or nothing at all, as it would be better for me when the person rejects and I can get my money from somewhere else.
So life is not as simple as in this experiment with $ or with monkeys.
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/04/inequality_and_perceptions_of.php
It is a blog and there are two interesing ideas and I have written my comment to it, and I also post my comment here, but you may want to read what made me write my comment.
Monkeys and their fairness or just only negotiating behavior??
Well, both can bee seen, the reaction occurs in context, and we, as well as monkeys are multi-level thinker: So both examples are correct. There is one truth about reactions and information and context.
Just consider the caser of a marriage swindler, he says how much he loves a woman, maybe he does a bit, but his goal is to get her money. Now take a man ho really loves that woman, he also says he loves her.
So you have two extremely similar behavioral expressions but they mean completely something different. They are differently motivated.
The same is with the monkeys: they would perform two extremely similar behavioral actions but the trigger for this action would be different. Once it is fairness and in the second situation it is the rejection of lower quality offer. But the displayed action is the same, or nearly the same.
Another example in humans, just consider a person entering a room a greeting everybody. And then comes the second person and also greets everybody. Where is the difference? Well, one person greets because this person loves people and likes to get into contact with them and respect them. The other person does not like people but was severely taught by mother to greet anytime when entering a room and if not greeting mother applied some kind of punishment. You have the same or nearly the same behavior displayed by the two persons but the motivation was different.
If you properly watch the behavior of people and animals you will find many other examples where the same behavior means slightly or severely different motivation, and thus also different explanation of such behavior.
The experiment with $10 and offering $5 to the other one is extremely narrow experiment, as there is no other contextual information, which is not usually true in real life. People live in groups and so they have always some other additional information, or they ask for some other additional information.
Imagine following example: you want to get something repaired in your home so you ask two or three experts to make you an offer, but this is not enough you go around and ask in your neighborhood how these experts accomplished their tasks. So solely the price is not enough,, you need the context of quality of work, you need references, you need more contextual information.
Back to our $-experiment and real life. If in real life I would be asked to divide ten bucks between me an the other, there were many other aspect also important. If the person is really a good on I can trust, and the person already has helped me many times, so I offer $6 for the person and only $4 for myself, and opposite, if the person has proved unreliable and there is a danger of being hurt by that person I would offer very little, maybe only two or nothing at all, as it would be better for me when the person rejects and I can get my money from somewhere else.
So life is not as simple as in this experiment with $ or with monkeys.
# posted by Dalibor @ 2:10 AM 
