Fair Is Not Fair Everywhere
By Marie Schäfer, Daniel Haun, Michael Tomasello. 2015
167 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Distributing the spoils of a joint enterprise on the basis of work contribution or relative productivity seems natural to the modern Western mind. But such notions of merit-based distributive justice may be culturally constructed norms that vary with the social and economic structure of a group. In the present research, we showed that children from three different cultures have very different ideas about distributive justice. Whereas children from a modern Western society distributed the spoils of a joint enterprise precisely in proportion to productivity, children from a gerontocratic pastoralist society in Africa did not take merit into account at all. Children from a partially hunter-gatherer, egalitarian African culture distributed the spoils more equally than did the other two cultures, with merit playing only a limited role. This pattern of results suggests that some basic notions of distributive justice are not universal intuitions of the human species but rather culturally constructed behavioral norms.
Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability
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Citations in the corpus
- Re-imagining Algorithmic Fairness in India and Beyond (2021, background): “Similarly, a study of children in three different cultures found that notions of distributive justice are not universal: “children from a partially hunter-gatherer, egalitarian African culture distributed the spoils more equally than did the other two cultures, with merit playing only a limited role”
- Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP (2022, background): “As cultures around the world hold different values, their norms and ethics are inevitably different, too (Schäfer et al., 2015; Hanel et al., 2018).”