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Authors: Angarika Deb, Christophe Heintz
Keywords: Fairness, Complementary Coordination, Gendered division of household labour, Fairness Judgements, Fairness intuitions
Abstract: Fairness is considered to be an important pillar of human societies. We invariably want our societies to be fair and we want to interact with those who care about fairness. But what do we really mean by fairness? Evolutionary biologists posit, its an evolved intuition which ensures large-scale coordination and cooperation, social scientists theorize it as an ideological and/ or cultural stance in interactions, whereas economic scientists claim it to be a preference for proportionality between inputs and outputs (models of equity). And indeed, each view has its own merit. However, to understand human fairness as a whole, we need to specify an underlying mechanism.
We put forward the claim that fairness is a specific psychological mechanism, which evaluates and integrates multiple sources of information, to generate preferences for (own and others’) behavior, which might or might not be equitable. It is complex (changing from culture to culture, person to person and even one experiment to another), volatile (changing within the same individual) and relative (‘more’ or ‘less’ fair, compared in relation to others’ situations). Such a notion can encompass intuitive fairness, deliberative evaluations of what is fair, as well as moral and cultural ideologies of fairness. Thus, we put forward fairness, not just as a generic evolved intuition for maintaining some sort of proportionality in social interactions, but as a sophisticated mechanism, highly sensitive to environmental and socio-cultural factors.
Scanning the literature on fairness gives us an appreciation of how variable fairness judgements really can be. Multiple hypotheses have been put forward in different disciplines, suggesting factors relevant in perceiving fairness. Some of these include outside options, cultural ideologies, social comparison networks, partner choice and power relations. Out of these, outside options is a major factor that accounts for many of the others. It can be defined as the options an individual has, outside of their current interaction and includes factors, such as availability of partners, resources, opportunities, etc. These factors are further determined by subsistence economies, cultural norms and ideologies, biological markets etc. The hypothesis is, ‘having higher outside options than one’s partner would make a profitable share in resource division seem to be fair, while having lower outside options would do the reverse.’ We propose to test this hypothesis in the specific case of complementary coordination, where agents coordinate by performing distinct and complementary tasks to enjoy a joint outcome. In complementary coordination, the problem of fairness becomes even more interesting, since the distribution of tasks for successful coordination, is by nature, asymmetrical. We look at the specific case of gendered division of household labour, which is a ubiquitous social venture of complementary coordination and where fairness has been deemed to be of high value in sustaining relationships.