The Psychological Complexities of Equality and Fairness; Azarakhsh Mokri

The Psychological Complexities of Equality and Fairness: Is the Pursuit of Justice Innate or Learned?

A Report on Two Talks by Dr. Azarakhsh Mokri

Equality and fairness are words we constantly use in discussions of family life, the workplace, politics, and economics, yet they often provoke sharp disagreements before their meanings have even been clarified. In two talks entitled “The Psychological Complexities of Equality and Fairness,” Dr. Azarakhsh Mokri seeks to move the issue beyond the level of slogans: Why does another person’s advancement sometimes make us feel that we have lost out, even when our own situation has also improved? Were early humans inherently egalitarian, with the modern economy gradually eroding that tendency? Or, conversely, did some of our present-day moral sensitivity to inequality emerge through markets, large institutions, education, and culture?

Mokri offers no simple, one-line answer. Reviewing evolutionary theories, cross-cultural research, and several experimental games involving the distribution of resources, he argues that we need to distinguish among several different phenomena: resenting the fact that someone else has more than we do; feeling troubled when we ourselves have more than someone else; defending equality of outcome; and defending distribution in proportion to effort and merit. In his view, conflating these phenomena lies at the root of many moral and political disputes.

The Coin Experiment: If I Am Better Off, Why Am I Still Dissatisfied?

Mokri begins with a simple thought experiment. Suppose two people initially possess very little, and then both make gains: one person’s wealth rises from one coin to twelve, while the other’s rises to fifty or sixty coins. On one interpretation, the first person should be pleased: he, too, is wealthier than before. Yet for many people, the new gap matters more than the absolute improvement in their own position: “Why did the other person gain so much more?”

For Mokri, this difference in response is not merely an individual quirk. He regards it as one of the psychological roots of disagreements over free markets, capitalism, socialism, and redistributive policies. Part of the disagreement may arise because some people see another person’s increase in wealth—even when it does not directly harm them—as a threat or a sign of unfairness; others, by contrast, focus more on enlarging the “pie” and improving everyone’s position.

Here he points to two related concepts: zero-sum thinking and anti-profit beliefs. Zero-sum thinking assumes that if one person gains, someone else must have lost; it therefore has difficulty accepting “win-win” outcomes. Anti-profit beliefs, meanwhile, regard the intention to make a profit with suspicion: if someone benefits from an activity, it is as though that benefit must necessarily have come at others’ expense. Mokri emphasizes that in many modern interactions—for example, trade and exchange—this assumption is not always correct; nevertheless, it can exert a powerful influence on people’s psychological experience.

The Evolutionary Account: Restraining Dominants and “Coalitional Leveling”

The first talk initially takes an evolutionary theory seriously. Referring to Richard Wrangham and Christopher Boehm, Mokri explains that in small hunter-gatherer groups, establishing lasting dominance was costly for a powerful individual. According to this account, lower-ranking members of the group could form coalitions, ostracize or restrain the dominant individual, and in some cases resort to violence against him. Wrangham speaks of “planned conspiratorial killing,” while Boehm uses the term “coalitional leveling”: a mechanism whereby subordinates join forces to bring down someone who has risen too far above the rest.

Boehm depicts this history as an “egalitarian zigzag”: primate societies and some more distant human ancestors were more hierarchical; human hunter-gatherer groups developed more egalitarian tendencies; with agriculture and the accumulation of property, inequality intensified once again; and in the modern world, democratic institutions have created new mechanisms for constraining power.

This explanation is linked to the hypothesis of “evolutionary mismatch”: perhaps a brain shaped in small groups under conditions of limited resources is not calibrated for life in cities of millions and complex economies. On this view, our intense sensitivity to disparities and to other people’s gains may be a remnant of circumstances in which one person’s gain really could reduce another person’s share.

Mokri does not, however, regard this account as the final answer; he treats it as a hypothesis that must be tested against cross-cultural evidence.

Two Kinds of Inequality Aversion

At the heart of both talks is a distinction between two forms of sensitivity:

• Disadvantageous inequality aversion: I have received less than someone else, and I am dissatisfied with the situation.

• Advantageous inequality aversion: I have received more than someone else, yet I find my own advantage unfair and troubling.

For the first type, Mokri refers to the famous experiment by Frans de Waal: a monkey that receives cucumber rather than grapes for performing the same task protests when compared with its grape-receiving counterpart. Similar reactions to receiving less have also been reported in some other animals. But the animal that receives the better reward generally does not protest against an inequality in its own favor.

This raises an important question: Is a more moral human being someone who is troubled even by receiving a larger share? Mokri cautions against treating the answer as self-evident. He notes that the protest of those who receive less has also played a fundamental role in the history of social change. We therefore cannot simply label one of these sensitivities “good” and the other “bad.”

To sharpen the issue, he refers to “justice sensitivity” questionnaires, which separately measure four situations: sensitivity when the individual is personally the victim of injustice; sensitivity when witnessing injustice against another person; sensitivity to personally benefiting from injustice; and sensitivity to perpetrating injustice. The point is that people do not score alike across these four dimensions. Someone may be sensitive only when personally harmed, while remaining unmoved by harm to others or by their own unfair advantage; another person may display precisely the opposite pattern.

Children and Cultures: Where Does Equality Come From?

Mokri then turns to studies of children and different societies. In one experiment, children engage in an activity resembling fishing for metal blocks. Sometimes one child, without knowing it, has a stronger magnet and therefore catches more blocks; in other cases, effort and outcome are genuinely equal or unequal. The children are then asked how the reward should be divided.

The findings reported in the talk show that there is no single answer. Children in a hunter-gatherer community in Namibia were more inclined toward equal division in some unequal situations; German children, when they believed differences in outcome reflected effort or skill, were more willing to accept distribution according to performance; and other groups fell somewhere between these two patterns. The important conclusion is not the inherent superiority of one culture, but the dependence of judgments of fairness on how children understand the causes of differences and on their social environment.

Another study discussed by Mokri examines, across several urban and non-urban societies, whether children and adults prefer “two sweets for me and none for the other person” or “one sweet for each of us.” In modern urban societies, the tendency to choose equal distribution increased with age; in some hunter-gatherer groups or societies less integrated into markets, this tendency was lower and more stable. Moreover, showing clips that endorsed generosity and equal sharing increased the choice of equal distribution.

In Mokri’s reading, these findings count against the simplistic idea that pervasive egalitarianism is a fully formed and untouched feature of the “Stone Age brain.” At least advantageous inequality aversion, in these data, becomes stronger through development, education, and cultural context, rather than being present everywhere from the outset with equal intensity.

Markets, Religion, and Large-Scale Society: Reading Joseph Henrich

The second talk draws largely on research by Joseph Henrich and his colleagues. These studies employed three well-known games:

• In the dictator game, one person is free to divide a resource between themselves and another person however they wish.

• In the ultimatum game, the recipient can reject an unequal offer, in which case neither party receives anything.

• In the third-party punishment game, an observer who does not benefit from the distribution can incur a cost to punish an unfair allocator.

These games have been conducted among groups differing in subsistence patterns, population size, and degree of market integration. Mokri draws out three striking correlations: the more integrated people were into exchange and markets, the more generously and equally they divided resources; the larger the community, the higher the minimum acceptable offer in the ultimatum game and the greater the willingness to punish unfairness; and belief in world religions was also correlated with these patterns.

Within this interpretation, contemporary cooperation and fairness are not merely extensions of kinship instincts or expectations of reciprocity in small groups. Trade, encounters with strangers, universal religious rules, and life in large communities create norms that compel or encourage people to take account of others even when they are not kin. This point is particularly at odds with the common image of “the market as a force that destroys equality”: in the data under discussion, greater market integration was associated with fairer behavior in these games.

Even so, Mokri himself raises a methodological caution: some hunter-gatherer groups, including the Hadza, have repeatedly been subjects of research, and repeated familiarity with researchers and experiments may affect the results. These studies should therefore be treated as important evidence, not as a license to construct a definitive, romantic—or reverse-romantic—portrait of all early societies.

Was Generosity in Early Societies Always Moral?

Mokri devotes another part of the argument to the possibility of accumulation. In societies without refrigeration, money, or means of concealing property, some resources—such as hunted meat—are perishable and cannot be stored for long. Giving away a surplus under such conditions may be both a rational way of preventing waste and an investment in a relationship that will later be reciprocated, rather than necessarily a sign of selfless altruism.

He refers to a longitudinal study of groups in Botswana and Namibia in which, as money and storable goods became more widespread, network-based gift-giving declined while purchasing, individual ownership, and the diversity of possessions increased. The speaker concludes from this change that if earlier equality and generosity had simply been deeply rooted and immutable features of human nature, the arrival of new possibilities should not have altered behavior so rapidly.

At this point, he offers another interpretation of the apparent equality of small groups: sometimes people do not conceal property, or share it, not out of pure benevolence but out of fear of the group’s reaction. Coalitional leveling can threaten an individual who takes too large a share. Moreover, when it becomes possible to conceal property, or when the recipient has no history of cooperation, sharing does not necessarily occur. The existence of gift-giving and sharing in early societies should therefore not immediately be taken as evidence of absolute egalitarianism.

Equality of Outcome or Merit-Based Fairness?

The final knot in the discussion is the distinction between equality and merit-based fairness. Mokri emphasizes that disagreements between left and right, or liberals and conservatives, are often not disagreements over the principle of “fair distribution”: both sides may regard it as desirable. The disagreement begins when each adopts a different definition of fairness: Does justice mean an equal final outcome? Or does it mean greater reward for greater work, greater skill, or greater responsibility?

In an experiment he recounts, participants are assigned the roles of either typist or editor. When three units of typing work are set against one unit of editing, typists are more likely than others to regard a 75–25 distribution in their own favor as fair and ethical; editors are more inclined toward equal distribution. Even when people state their views before learning their roles, their moral judgments change once the role that increases or decreases their own share is revealed. When differences in effort become more ambiguous, support for unequal division also weakens.

Mokri’s point is not that every claim of merit is invalid. His point is psychological: our interests, and the “pretexts” we find to justify them, can rapidly shift our perception of fairness. Credentials, seniority, job titles, or any other rule may genuinely be relevant; but they can also become excuses for making our own larger share appear natural. Judging fairness therefore requires an independent examination of the criteria, rather than simply trusting the intuition we develop once we know our own position.

Conclusion: Neither a Simple Celebration of Equality nor Simple Cynicism About It

Mokri’s two talks can be understood as an invitation to avoid two extremes. The first is romanticizing human beings or early societies: imagining that premodern humanity was inherently fair, generous, and egalitarian, and that money and markets corrupted it. The second is ignoring the genuine suffering and anger caused by inequality—especially inequality that actually deprives people of opportunity, status, or reward.

The main conclusion presented in these two sessions is this: aversion to disadvantageous inequality is more widespread and probably more deeply rooted; but aversion to advantageous inequality and a willingness to divide equally are, to a greater extent than is commonly assumed, products of learning, culture, markets, institutions, and forms of social life. Moreover, some aspects of equality in early societies may have resulted from limits on accumulation or fear of collective reaction rather than from altruism alone.

This framework has practical applications in families, schools, and organizations. Many tensions arise when people feel that someone else has gained “more than their fair share,” even when that person’s gain does not necessarily constitute their loss. Understanding zero-sum thinking, distinguishing equality of outcome from equality of opportunity, and recognizing the role of self-interest in defining “fairness” can help move discussion away from accusation and crude suspicion. Justice is not merely a question of distributing resources; it is also a question of understanding the mental mechanisms that tell us what counts as “my share” and what counts as “another person’s right.”

Sources Discussed in the Talks:

• George Newman, How Big Ideas Happen

• Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox

• Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest

• Mark van Vugt and Ronald Giphart, Mismatch

• John R. Hibbing et al., Predisposed

• Joseph Henrich and Francisco J. Gil-White, “The Evolution of Prestige”

• Blake, McAuliffe et al., “The Ontogeny of Fairness in Seven Societies”

• Schäfer, Haun and Tomasello, cross-cultural research on fairness in children