The Neuroscience of Justice

How does the human mind evaluate justice? This is an important question for understanding how people will decide to act in a society and vote in a polity. Science is beginning to dig into these interesting questions. A study at the University of Illinois asked subjects to allocate a scarce number of meals to Ugandan orphans.

Every decision pitted efficiency (the total number of meals given) against equity (how much the burden of lost meals was shared among the children).

One could choose to take 15 meals from a single child, for example, or 13 meals from one child and five from another. In the first option the total number of meals lost would be lower. Efficiency would be preserved, but one child would bear the brunt of all the cuts. In the second option more children would share the burden of lost meals but more meals would be lost. The equity was better -- but at a cost to efficiency.

"This dilemma illustrates the core issues of distributive justice, which involves tradeoffs between considerations that are at once compelling but which cannot be simultaneously satisfied," the authors wrote. - ScienceDaily

What's interesting is that these experiments showed that people, generally, value equity over efficiency. This is not the kind of finding that those in favor of markets and competition over all like to hear (and will further exacerbate the conservative aversion to science).

In these trails, subjects overwhelmingly chose to preserve equity at the expense of efficiency, Hsu said. "They were all quite inequity averse." The findings support other studies that show that most people are fairly intolerant of inequity. - ScienceDaily

What's interesting is that this study of the brain corroborates some elements of an economic study from last year, which showed that people were willing to be taxed (to a certain degree) to acheieve greater income equality.

Applying their model to pre-existing survey data, the authors found that, on average, people are willing to sacrifice about 20 percent of their disposable income to live in an equitable society - but they also found that the value a person places on equity is substantially affected by their race and educational background. - ScienceDaily

It just goes to show that in circumstances absent interference, people prefer justice and equity, not competition and inequity.