magazine issue 7 2007 / Issue 4

Fairness Judgments: Genuine Morality or Disguised Egocentrism?

• written by Jan-Willem van Prooijen

A remaining question, then, is to what extent people are consciously aware that their fairness judgments are inflated by egocentrism. Based on the idea that people automatically and effortlessly have an egocentric perception of the surrounding social world (Caruso et al., 2006), it stands to reason that egocentrism in fairness judgments also occurs automatically. As such, it is likely that people often are unaware that that their fairness evaluations are shaped by a concern to benefit themselves. Preliminary evidence for such unawareness of one's own egocentrism was found in research by Ham and Van den Bos (in press). In an experiment, participants read descriptions of fair or unfair events. These events either referred to themselves (e.g., "You and your colleague do the same work. You make 1400 Euros a month and your colleague makes 4100 Euros a month") or to third-person pronouns (e.g., "He and his colleague do the same work. He makes 1400 Euros a month and his colleague makes 4100 Euros a month"). After each event, it was assessed by means of reaction times to what extent justice knowledge was automatically activated. Results revealed that justice knowledge was more strongly activated following self-related descriptions than following other-related descriptions. These findings suggest that when people themselves are involved in a moral dilemma, evaluations of the fairness of the situation are more strongly determined by uncontrollable psychological processes than when only others are involved in the dilemma. Extrapolating these findings to the soccer team example at the beginning of this contribution, it seems likely that Team A and Team B members do not always consciously realize to what extent their fairness judgments are influenced by the extent to which the penalty was favorable or unfavorable to themselves.

To conclude, it does not seem appropriate to sharply distinguish fairness from egocentrism, as fairness judgments often are shaped by egocentrism. This is not to say, of course, that prosocial motives and ‘genuine’ morality do not play any possible role in fairness judgments. Most certainly, people often display a genuine effort to act fairly in moral dilemmas, and honestly believe to have other’s best interests in mind. The presently reviewed findings suggest, however, that such “genuine morality” is most likely to successfully shape fairness judgments in situations where people are truly independent evaluators, who have no personal concerns at stake in the situation at hand. When people do have personal concerns in a moral dilemma, their fairness-based reasoning is likely to be influenced by egocentrism, presumably without being very much aware of it. Egocentrism may thus be a very potent factor to explain why people can differ so immensely in what solutions to social problems they consider to be fair or unfair.

References

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Van Prooijen, J.-W., Van den Bos, K., Lind, E. A., & Wilke, H. A. M. (2006). How do people react to negative procedures? On the moderating role of authority’s biased attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 632-645.