Study finds people are bothered by economic unfairness, not inequality

An article in the April edition of Nature Human Behavior argues that people are more concerned with economic unfairness than economic inequality, despite popular belief to the contrary.

The study, written by Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom, suggests humans actually prefer inequality. “Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children,” the authors write, “we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”