The original posts:
Social Science and Political Agendas, Part I
"Twenty pairs of healthy, previously unacquainted male participants participated in the experiment. They were each paid a base $30 fee; each then drew a ball from a hat, labelled ‘rich’ or ‘poor’. The ‘rich’ (high-pay) subject received an immediate payment of $50, whereas the ‘poor’ (low-pay) player received no bonus payment. They then performed an identical task in consecutive fMRI scanning sessions. In each trial subjects viewed possible monetary transfers from the experimenter to themselves and to the other player, ranging from $0 to $50 (Fig. 1). Participants rated how appealing they found the possible transfers on a scale of 25 (very unappealing) to 5 (very appealing). After both players’ scans, a single trial was randomly picked from the set, and the transfers for that trial were paid out." - Tricomi, E., A. Rangel, et al. (2010) Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences.
The above game is an example of what I call an "Act of God" study design, in which researchers (playing God) randomly dole out good and bad fortune to study participants, typically in the form of monetary payments. The researchers then look at the behavior, perceptions or brain activity of the "rich' and "poor" participants to assess the effects of the experimental manipulation, such as evidence that the rich participants whom God favored (got paid more) were uncomfortable with their good fortune. For instance, in the above-referenced study, brain areas associated with reward lit up in rich participants when they saw poor participants getting more money from the researchers. As if an initial wrong was being put right. Tricomi et al argue these results "provide direct neurobiological evidence in support of the existence of inequality-averse social preferences in the human brain."
Interesting stuff...but I see bias written all over it. First, in the game set-up, labeling the balls "rich" and "poor" in itself primes a social justice mindset. As does the clearly arbitrary allocation of payments. It's not exactly unusual for people who luck out on easy money to grasp that their own good fortune is not exactly fair. And the game is designed so the rich player associates his or her own good fortune with the other player's bad fortune. The researchers basically pushed all the right buttons to make the rich player alert to the unfairness of it all. Is it any wonder that the rich player's brain reward centers lit up when the poor player gets more money later on?
In other words, the study design was rigged to support the inequality-aversion hypothesis. Tricomi et al also discuss their findings in a way that goes way beyond the evidence. For instance, they refer to inequality aversion as a "basic" response and equity concerns as a "pervasive and fundamental feature of human social exchange". They dismiss issues of deservingness and need as "self-serving biases". That's a moral judgment masquerading as scientific fact.
What I'd like to see is a study that considers the role of "deservingness" in reactions to inequality, perhaps comparing how subjects respond to unequal allocation of resources when the resources are earned rather than randomly allocated, as has been suggested by Marczyk 2017. It would be easy to control for self-serving biases by making study participants outside observers of resource allocation scenarios involving other people.
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Social Science and Political Agendas, Part II
Here’s one line of thought: some things make humans happy or unhappy naturally. The best societies are those with the happiest people. Therefore, governments should aim to make the people as happy as possible: a task that requires expertise on conditions conducive to happiness. Social scientists provide that expertise. They can also help sell political agendas.
Take the case of “inequality-aversion” – the idea that humans don’t like inequality. According to this theory, inequality aversion is in our DNA, an adaptation from harsher times when sharing was essential to survival. It is therefore natural to be distressed about inequality and to feel better when resources are more equally distributed. Thus, the best societies are more equal, because more equal societies are happier societies.
If things were only that simple. One problem is that on the macro-level, country-wide correlations between inequality and happiness say nothing about causation. And on the micro-level, people vary in their reactions to inequality, depending on how they see its causes and effects. For instance, if one believes that long term poverty is the result of bad choices, the fact that some people are worse off than others may not be all that upsetting. But if one believes that affluence is mostly a matter of luck, inequality may very well trigger outrage. Point is, no one has an emotional reaction to inequality without a sense of what it speaks to. Inequality is a concept, for God's sake. It's not at the same level of concreteness as, say, a snake slithering in the grass.
Social scientists are people too, with their own intuitions about human nature, happiness, inequality and ideal societies. I'm talking economists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists (etc). I'm talking about the people who made up the theory of inequality-aversion.
The research social scientists conduct and the conclusions they reach are not independent of their intuitions about what is and ought to be. That's no reason to dismiss their work, only a plea to be alert to possible lapses of scientific rigor in what they do and say.
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Update, consisting of excerpts from Social Mobility Explains Populism, Not Inequality or Culture by Eric Protzer:
“…humans do not simply care about the magnitudes of final outcomes such as losses or inequalities. They care deeply about whether each individual’s economic outcomes occur for fair reasons…To treat everyone equally would entail penalization of more productive individuals when they collaborate with less productive individuals relative to highly productive individuals. In contrast with equality, fairness allows individuals with different levels of productivity to share the benefits of their collaboration proportionately.
Naturally, economic fairness coexists and competes with other values and behaviors that may enhance survival depending on specific circumstances. For example, some societies are xenophobic, and do not include outside ethnic groups in the collection of agents with which cooperation is possible. Solidarity, on the other hand, entails that some resources go towards members of society who cannot fully support themselves, even if they do not contribute much to cooperative production. The point here is not to describe a universal maxim that all humans perceive to be moral, but to describe one specific family of moral-economic rules that is arguably widespread because it has been promoted in an evolutionary process.
Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom (2017) review the behavioral science literature on inequality to demonstrate that “there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness.” ...[They point] out that in the ultimatum game nobody has done anything to earn a higher reward than anyone else [ -what I called an Act of God study design in the first post]. Thus in that particular circumstance, unequal rewards are perceived to be unfair, but the generalizable principle is that people are averse to unfairness. Indeed, the authors show that in numerous experiments people consistently want to accord higher rewards to those who have exerted more effort – as that is the fair, albeit necessarily unequal, outcome. Children and even infants also exhibit this value."
References:
Marczyk J (2017) Human punishment is not primarily motivated by inequality. PLoS ONE 12(2): e0171298. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0171298
Protzer, Eric S. M. Social Mobility Explains Populism, Not Inequality or Culture CID Research Fellow and Graduate Student Working Paper Series 2021.118, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, September 2019. Revised May 2021
Starmans, C., Sheskin, M. & Bloom, P. Why people prefer unequal societies. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0082 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0082
Tricomi, E., A. Rangel, et al. (2010) Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences. Nature 463: 1089.