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All Else Being Equal: Overcoming the Egalitarian Norm

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Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing

Abstract

People who are in powerful positions (e.g., government officials, employers, parents) often decide how to allocate goods to other people. Indeed, control over resources is precisely one of the things that confers power. This chapter provides a brief overview of distributive justice theory, which deals with fairness standards for allocating some limited resource. We next review relevant research on social power, or the ability to influence others in psychologically meaningful ways through the giving or withholding of rewards and punishments. We then present two experiments that examine the effects of power and a number of situational (e.g., ingroup–outgroup, priming notions of power or merit), demographic (e.g., gender), and attitude and personality variables (e.g., political orientation, communal orientation, merit orientation, work ethic, egalitarianism, collectivism, and empathy) on individuals’ allocation behavior in a resource distribution task. The experiments examine the allocation of two different resources: money (Experiment 1) and time on work assignments (Experiment 2). Across both experiments, the results indicate a strong norm of equality, which appears to trump other considerations, such as recipients’ apparent need, merit, or similarity to the allocator. The final section discusses the findings’ implications, such as whether this egalitarian norm can be overcome, and whether it is desirable to do so.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Drawing on Aristotle, Scott (this volume) refers to this situation as absolute equality, as opposed to proportional equality, which is more akin to merit or equity.

  2. 2.

    Some instances of goods versus bads can be construed as a framing effect, as when the withholding of a desirable commodity (e.g., a raise) is construed as a negative outcome (i.e., a bad), or the withholding of an undesirable commodity (e.g., forced overtime) is construed as a positive outcome (i.e., a good; see Gamliel and Peer 2006; Kinsey et al. 1991).

  3. 3.

    Studies employing real monetary allocations are probably in the minority in psychology, but they are common in other fields, such as experimental economics (Camerer 2003; Hertwig and Ortmann 2001). On the other hand, a fair amount of psychological research does investigate the allocation of other resources, such as time-on-task (Chen et al. 2001) or helpfulness (Tesser and Smith 1980). The present research integrates these approaches by using multiple kinds of real-world allocation tasks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 68588-0308, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Brian H. Bornstein & Sarah J. Gervais

  2. Center on Children, Families, and the Law, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 206 S. 13th St., Suite 1000, 68588-0227, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Hannah L. Dietrich

  3. Center for Research in Law and Justice, University of Illinois-Chicago, 921 W. van Buren St., Suite 230, 60607, Chicago, IL, USA

    Justin Escamilla

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  1. Brian H. Bornstein
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  2. Sarah J. Gervais
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  4. Justin Escamilla
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Correspondence to Brian H. Bornstein .

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

    Brian H. Bornstein

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

    Richard L. Wiener

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Bornstein, B., Gervais, S., Dietrich, H., Escamilla, J. (2014). All Else Being Equal: Overcoming the Egalitarian Norm. In: Bornstein, B., Wiener, R. (eds) Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0623-9_1

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