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The Neuroscience of Unfairness

By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics

In the early stages of the pandemic many people purchased more than they needed leaving others without. This created panic buying and the shelves were stripped bare with supermarket unable to keep up with demand. There was public outrage when it became clear that many of the people putting their own lives at risk for the rest of society were unable to get basic supplies after a busy shift in hospitals and care homes. Eventually, the supermarkets had to implement policies that limited the number of items people could purchase, and had special opening times when medical workers could gain access without having to wait hours in a queue.

Recent studies show that when we deem something is unfair it activates a part of the brain called the Insula. The Insula is involved in intense emotions including the response when you eat, or even think about having to eat, something disgusting. There is now evidence that a feeling of fairness is a critical element of our social makeup, as important as food and safety. 

Even as important as Money

In one experiment by Golanza Tabibnia at the Carnegie Mellon University he found that people would rather go without getting any money than seeing another person get an unfair amount. In another experiment it showed that people’s reward centres light up a lot more when they receive $5, if they know it’s from a pot of $10, than if it is $5 out of $20. So it seems that a sense of fairness is even more important to us than money.

This also applies to situations were people feel that they are treated differently, for example, where some high performing sales people are allowed to get away with coming in late or not following the rules and where other staff are reprimanded for similar behaviour. It can also apply where some staff are not pulling their weight and the manager does not address their underperformance. While the manager may be avoiding the discomfort of confrontation they are causing a deep and damaging sense of unfairness and disgust, in the rest of the team.

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