Inequality emotion

A central theme to understand "doing inequality", that is, understanding how inequalities are created and repeated through interactive processes, systems in everyday life.

Emotion management of inequality generates uncomfortable feelings of shame, anger, resentment and hopelessness.

Power relationship within people, social structure of organisations.

We must not just pay close attention to how power is achieved in everyday circumstances, but how it is resisted through the action of ordinary people.

We must also pay attention to "manufacturing consent" that is, how ordinary people "give consent" to institutional, organisational systems which end up dominating them.

Is Fairness a Hard-Wired Emotion?

The belief that things should be divided fairly among members of a group isn't just a matter of culture or reason it's an emotion that's built into the human brain.

Is everyone sensitive to fairness?

The insights involving the insula, the oval region of the cerebral cortex involving the putamen and caudate which plays a key role in emotions, supports the idea, that emotion rather than reason is at the base of people's attitudes about inequality.

The study, by researchers at the University of Illinois and the California Institute of Technology, was published in the May 8 2008 issue of Science.

For the study, the volunteers were supposedly asked to distribute food to children in an orphanage in Uganda. The children would be given the cash equivalent of 24 meals, a "gift" from the research team to the orphanage.

But, a number of meals would have to be cut for some of the children.
So, the volunteers were given two options to deal with the problem.

In one option, 15 meals could be taken from one child, or 13 from another child, or five from yet another child, for instance. Choosing this option, the total number of meals lost would be less, but one child would suffer from all cuts. Efficiency would be maintained at the expense of fairness.

The second option reduced efficiency, but promoted fairness. In this option, all the children would be fed, but they'd share fewer meals.
The researchers found that the study participants overwhelmingly chose the second option. This finding echoed other studies that showed that most people are intolerant of unfairness.

During the experiment, the volunteers underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. This allowed the researchers to determine which parts of the brain were most affected during decision-making.

The researchers found that regions of the brain called the insula, putamen and caudate were activated differently, and at different times, during the experiment. The insula responded to changes in fairness, while the putamen responded to changes in efficiency. The caudate appeared to blend both fairness and efficiency.

The insights involving the insula, which plays a key role in emotions, supports the idea that emotion rather than reason is at the base of people's attitudes about inequality. Also the studies had found that the insula is involved in deciding fairness. But, the putamen and the caudate are activated during reward-related learning the researchers noted.

"These results support the idea that people care about fairness at a very deep level”.


“When people see an unfair offer, they actually have a negative emotional reaction to it," the researcher said. "They have a gut reaction to unfairness."

What do you think?