Can You Be Taught to Reject an Unfair Advantage?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The only talk show with an introduction that mentions its own introduction. And that's happening right now in this introduction.
The last show with David Cooper.
If you're handed a bigger slice of the pie, more money, for example, for no good reason, do you question the system or do you grab a fork and eat it up? Can we learn to reject unfair advantages just by watching other people do it?
What is advantageous inequality and how does it affect us?
Well, that is precisely the question that Ross Otto's research tries to attack. He's a psychology professor at McGill University. Ross, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
So advantageous inequality, what exactly is it? Let's start there. And why are most of us totally fine with it when we're the ones getting the advantage?
Yeah, so I think it'd be helpful to kind of situate this in a kind of classic paradigm that behavioral economists and psychologists have been studying this in. So there's something in game theory called the ultimatum game. And the idea is, okay, if you have 10 apples and you're what's called the proposer, so you propose an offer to me. Imagine you say, here's a split. I'm going to keep eight apples and give two of them to you. Now, I have two choices. I can either accept this offer, right, which seems unfair, and then I get the two, you get the eight, or I can reject it and nobody gets anything. And so the interesting thing, right, is people get mad when you propose something like, I get eight apples, you get two.
And they'll do what's called costly punishment. So they'll reject it. So they'd rather get no apples than two apples just to send a signal that that's unfair and you violated a norm.
Well, that's comforting to know that I guess most people reject these extremely unfair outcomes. Some of us, I assume, accept them, though.
Yeah, so there's some kind of cultural differences across cultures that have been studied somewhat. So people in different kinds of cultures are more likely to accept or reject those kind of offers. But that case is what's called disadvantageous inequity. So by being offered two apples, it's disadvantageous to me To accept the offer. But what if you flip it? Right. So what if you propose to me? God knows why you say you can have eight apples and I'm going to keep two in that situation. Right. People rarely reject those kind of offers. Right. Even though they're unfair, they're unfair in a different way. Right.
A little less comforting, I suppose, about humanity on that one.
Yeah. So one kind of question is what would make people more willing to punish this sort of unfairness? So this kind of concern for these high minded ideals of, say, equality. Right. So it's hard because I have to give up something, namely my unfair share. Right. In order to do that.
Someone once told me, and I'm not a historian, I'm not even sure it's true, but a lot of the people who spearheaded the French Revolution were the sons and daughters of the aristocracy, which means they were the ones with the larger slice still fighting against an unjust system. I don't even know if it's true, but I've been told it is by someone who studied history. This sort of applies for money. Like it can apply to salary. It can apply to like unfair advantage at birth. Like if you're the son or daughter of a millionaire, billionaire kind of thing. Why does studying apples really simplify the problem? Can we make, can we infer things about like societal inequality from this apple test?
Yeah, so we did it with hypothetical money. So there weren't even apples at stake. So these participants, this was an online study. Basically, you're paired up against random people, other people on the internet. Now, these were actually fake people, right? So that way we could manipulate their own behavior. But what we wanted to do then was ask, can we teach people to learn to punish or reject these kind of offers that is advantageously unfair offers. And so people, like I said, by default, right, don't tend to punish those offers because they benefit. But what we had people do was watch interactions between another proposer and another what's called receiver, that is a person who can
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