Research Hit: Fairness in the Brain under Stress

New research shows we prefer to help rather than punish when under stress.

You’ve written about fairness before - how does this differ?

Yes, I have written a few times on this. Fairness is important in society. In this post I looked at a circuit for social comparisons:

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Unfair! Brain Circuit for Fair Rewards Identified

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And this one looked at fairness vs. equity - showing we tend to prefer equity:

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Research Hit: Your Brain On Fairness and Equity - And How to Manipulate This

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But this research I am reporting on wanted to investigate how acute stress can impact fairness decision making.

Ok, explain more

This series of experiments by Huagen Wang et al. combined decision making when viewing unfairness combined with acute stress and brain scanning also.

Specifically when viewing unfairness we tend to want to “punish” the perpetrator. But alternatively we can also help the “victim”.

The scenario that is often used in research is something called the dictator game. In this one person receives a sum of money and can then choose to give some of this to a partner. Everyone tends to agree that the other person should receive a good proportion of the money and lowballing is considered unfair.

When viewing this a third person (in this case while having their brain scanned) can then decide to punish the individual giving the unfair offer by being able to give a fine, and take money away from them, or alternately to give the victim some money (to redress the unfairness).

But what was different is that those third persons while having their brain’s scanned were also subject to stress.

Oh and what happened?