The ideas and theories in the three articles are intriguing. It is not surprising for me when I read some of the theories, such as those of the first and second article. People are more likely to share what they have with people who are in poorer conditions when they know that both parties are collaborating in, or putting effort into, the same goal.
It is rarely the case that fairness exists. The rare existence of fairness does not necessarily mean there’s nothing we can do to equalize (or balance) all the parties. There are strategies alleviate the sense of unfairness. “I cut, you pick” and “tit for tat” work not only for children but also work for adults in teams or organizations. As long as both or multiple parties are making similarly equal amount of dedication or sacrifice, people won’t complain about the unfairness.
The third article surprised me in that I always think people make choices and decisions for their own benefit. However, in fact, people do not make decisions and take actions merely with respect to selfishness. People make considerations for others. Measuring gain and loss only financial wise will worsen the outcome.
For instance, there is a group project about constructing an experiment report with three or four classmates. The report contains four different parts, and which person is going to complete which part is decided randomly. There are two types of grading standards. In the first standard, each student is graded only by the quality of the proportion they put effort into writing. Even if other students in the group did a bad job writing their work, the final grade of this particular student will not be affected. In the second standard, however, students are graded by the overall quality of the entire report. Even though the four separate parts of the report are allocated to different group members, all four of them will get the same grade eventually.
Under the first grading standard situation, it is most likely to happen that no one or only a small amount of people would like to help with their group members when they encounter challenges and hard times, since not helping and bad report quality of others will have no negative consequence to everyone. In the first article, “How To Get Rich to Share the Marbles”, people have no obligation nor inclination of offering help and kindness to others when they randomly got the luck. It is the puller-keeper situation. Taking this idea back to my example, people with easier tasks in the report are less likely to help his or her group members when all the individual sections of reports are graded separately.
In the second grading standard situation, people are more likely to “collaborate” or offer help to people in the same group. The four group members are in the same boat and effort putting onto the report from each of them counts, so that they are willing to commit time and ideas,or “share their marbles”, with people got bad luck being allocated with report sections that are harder to compose. This phenomenon can be illustrated by the share-the-spoils condition.
I am interested in your comment that fairness rarely happens. It would be good to explain why you believe that. There are different notions of fairness based on (a) fairness of the system, where the outcomes might be equal and (b) fairness that is in some way based on the outcomes, even if they aren't perfectly equal. You might be interested in what the philosopher John Rawls has to say on the matter, in his essay Justice as Fairness. (I read this as an undergraduate.) He has an intellectual device in his paper called "the veil of ignorance" where ahead of time people don't know whether they will be smart or dull, rich or poor, handsome or ugly, etc. His notion of fairness stems from this state of ignorance. He then concludes that a fair system is the one that makes the worst off person as well off as possible. Sometimes that is called a maximin approach.
ReplyDeleteBut in reality we don't operate in the veil of ignorance. We already know a good deal about where we stand. The question then is wether you can define a system as fair or not when people do have such knowledge. I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that quite frequently the winners in society claim the system is fair, and tend to ignore their inherent advantage that made them winners. There has been quite a lot written about this recently. If you're interested in the topic, you might read this piece by Richard Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich.
Thank you for your comment :)
DeleteI agree that the winners in society barely complain about the unfairness of the system even though they are sometimes "taking advantage" because of they are born with certain superior resources, wealth, and intelligence. People who acquires benefits from the system will not complain, but people who does not possess above-average resources, wealth, and intelligence will. It is mostly the case that reallocation of such resources is "impossible", because people cannot choose which family they are born in (wealth, social class, or even intelligence), whether they are good-looking or not, etc.