What’s Fair Is Fair

But who can say what “fair” means? Nicholas Hune-Brown wonders whether cross-cultural standards of fairness exist, drawing on a study of the Pahari Korwa tribe in central India. Anthropologists asked participants to play the “ultimatum game,” in which two players decide how to split up a given sum. The first player proposes a division, and if the second player disagrees, neither player receives anything:

The researchers visited 21 villages, inviting 340 people to play the game (each person could only play once, as either “proposer” or “responder”). The [sum to be divided], in this case, was 100 rupees, equivalent to about two days of work in the region. If fairness is a cultural norm, you’d expect there to be some consistency across a culture; bargainers playing the ultimatum game should act similarly. With the Pahari Korwa, researchers found that responders across each of the villages indeed reacted the same way: they took the money. Whether the offer was five percent of the pot or 80, in all but five cases the responders took what was available. The proposers, however, varied substantially in their suggested splits. The modal offer across all villages was 50 percent, but there was no consistency. Some villages offered around 30 percent, while others, bafflingly, went as high as 70 percent.

The Pahari Korwa were all over the map. There was no single idea of fairness, no cultural conformity. The researchers argue that this could be because fairness isn’t a cultural norm, or at least not one that is shared across an entire ethno-linguistic group. They write that “the variation in cooperative and bargaining behaviour across human populations that is currently ascribed to culturally transmitted fairness norms may, in fact, be driven by individuals’ sensitivity to local environmental conditions.” That is, maybe a sense of fairness isn’t something that exists in something as large as a “culture.” Maybe it’s only shared between neighbours—the people you’ve chosen to live next to, presumably because you’re able to cooperate and share the same sense of what is fair.