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Fairness is more than just outcomes
We often think fairness is a simple moral rule: fair offers are good, and unfair offers are bad. But real life is more complicated. People do not judge fairness on its own; they also look at the situation around it.
How fairness is studied
Experimental psychologists often study fairness using a simple economic task called the Ultimatum Game. In this game, one player (called the ‘proposer’) is given money by the researcher and gets to decide how to divide it between themselves and a second player. The second player (called the ‘receiver’) can either accept the proposer’s offer (if so, both players get paid) or reject it (if so, neither player receives anything).
At first glance, this seems like an easy decision: as a receiver, you could accept any offer and still earn something. But in practice, research has shown that people often reject offers they consider unfair, even though this means they receive nothing. Since rejecting an offer means giving up money, this game is used by researchers as a measure of how people respond to unfairness and how strongly they prioritise their idea of fairness over their own financial gain.
As part of the Donders Institute CityLab initiative, a version of this game was placed in MuZIEum in Nijmegen. Over 10,000 visitors, from young adults to seniors, participated in the Ultimatum Game in the role of receiver, presented with selfish and generous offers and asked whether or not they would accept or reject each of them.
The results were clear: generous offers were accepted and selfish offers were often rejected. This shows that people are sensitive to being treated unfairly.
Expectations change how we judge others
The most interesting finding? People did not judge offers based only on the amount of money in front of them. Before making a decision, participants could choose to look at how the proposer had behaved towards others. Most people took this opportunity and this peek into the proposer’s behaviour influenced choices.
When a proposer who had often been generous to others, suddenly made a selfish offer, people were more likely to reject it. But when a usually selfish proposer made the same kind of offer? People reacted less strongly.
This suggests that fairness is not a fixed moral rule. It depends on context. People form their expectations based on how others behaved in the past, and these expectations shape how fair or unfair a new offer feels.
Everyday factors that quietly influence our decisions
This study did not take place in a controlled lab, but in a public setting with a large and diverse group of participants. This helped reveal patterns that laboratory experiments can often miss.
For example, older adults were more likely to accept offers, even when they were unfair. Another interesting finding was that people’s curiosity about the proposer’s past behaviour varied across the day. Participants who visited the muZIEum later in the day were more likely to want to look up information about the proposer than those who visited in the early morning.
These patterns tell us that, while fairness judgements are robust, they aren’t fixed. The way people seek out social information, and their willingness to accept unfairness, can change from person to person and even from hour to hour.
Fairness is therefore not just about how money is divided. It is about who is doing the dividing, what they have done before, and how we interpret the actions of other people.
Credits
Author: Sarah Vahed & Eirini Papazoglou
Buddy: Rick Arends
Translator: Lucas Geelen
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