Equity versus equality: Spectators, stakeholders and groups

Moral judgements of fairness-related actions are flexibly updated to account for contextual information

“…These findings support the view that some participants withheld their judgements when faced with a low offer and adjusted more strongly once they learned the context, indicating that these individuals found context-dependent norms (relative-selfishness) more important than context-independent norms (selfishness) even before the context was revealed. These findings are in line with previous research showing that people rely on context-dependent norms when additional contextual information exists (e.g., Konow et al, 2019). However, since withholding of judgements primarily occurred in trials with low offers, this raises a question why low offers are special in this regard.…”

“…Our findings outline systematic relationships between the importance of specific contextindependent norms and specific context-dependent norms to individuals. While much of the existing literature conceptualizes context-dependent and context-independent norms as opposites (Konow et al, 2019;Xiao & Bicchieri, 2010), the strong relations in our study contrarily may reflect general virtues or values. For example, the observed relationship between the endorsement of equality and endorsement of indirect reciprocity may reflect a general tendency to endorse balanced (reciprocal and equal) distributions of resources.…”

“…Within this list of fairness norms we can distinguish two kinds of norms: context-independent norms, such as equality and generosity, which are principles that can be applied to any distributive situation independent of contextual information regarding past behaviour, and context-dependent norms, such as equity, reciprocity and indirect reciprocity, which are contingent on the contextual information regarding past individual contributions to the shared resource, or past moral behaviours in general. Most previous research has studied fairness by giving participants tasks in which they can choose to behave in line with either context-independent or context-dependent norms, exposing that they find one more important than the other (Gächter & Riedl, 2006;Konow, Saijo, & Akai, 2019;Xiao & Bicchieri, 2010). For instance, previous research has shown that individual preferences for equity vs. equality relate to people's economic interests (DeScioli, Massenkoff, Shaw, Petersen, & Kurzban, 2014), and their political stance (Rasinski, 1987).…”

“…Although the relations between context-independent and context-dependent norms have not previously been assessed, several expectations can be derived from previous research on the relative importance of those norms for morality judgements in general. For instance, when third-party observers are well-informed about the relative contributions of each party to the common good, and in absence of any personal interest, a context-dependent equity norm is used in a judgement more often than the context-independent equality norm (Konow et al, 2019). Similarly, context-independent equality is used more often than context-dependent reciprocity only in exceptional situations, in which reciprocity generates extreme outcome disparities (Xiao & Bicchieri, 2010).…”

“…So far moral psychology has systematically studied individual differences in the importance people assign to broader domains (e.g., moral foundations), with fairness being only one domain compared with harm, purity, loyalty, and authority (Graham et al, 2011). Within the fairness domain, there have been studies showing strong differences in sharing behaviour across individuals (Gächter & Riedl, 2006;Konow et al, 2019;Xiao & Bicchieri, 2010). However, individual differences in fairness virtues have not been studied systematically.…”