Thinking and Deciding

434 FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE
that the company’s action was unfair. Different subjects saw the same story, except
that “no inflation” was replaced with “inflation of 12%” and the last sentence read,
“The company decides to increase salaries only 5% this year.” Of course, the “5%
increase” amounts (with inflation) to a 7% cut in income, but here only 22% of the
subjects thought that the company was unfair.
Local fairness. Ophthalmologists in Norway (and probably elsewhere) provide
high-quality care to their patients, but there are too few ophthalmologists, waiting
lists are long, and some patients never get seen at all (Elster, 1993). The overall
result would be better if care were a bit less thorough but more patients were seen.
Elster refers to a “norm of thoroughness” to describe the heuristic that justifies the
present system. Another way to look at the present situation is that those who operate
the system want to be fair to all the patients who get into it, giving each patient
the same high-quality care that the most demanding patients would get, according
to an equality principle. But this equality is local, in the sense that those outside of
the system are ignored. The same could be said for nations that provide extensive
(and expensive) equal rights for their citizens (or residents) but not for noncitizens
(or nonresidents). Could the cost of such provisions do more good if spent otherwise?
Singer (1982) presents an interesting discussion of the arbitrariness of group
boundaries.
Heuristics and self-interest
When people are affected by the choice of distributional rules, and when several different
rules or heuristics may be used, people tend to prefer the rule that favors them.
This effect is illustrated in an experiment done by van Avermaet (1974; reported in
Messick, 1985). Subjects were instructed to fill out questionnaires until told to stop.
They expected to be paid, but they did not know how much. Each subject was given
either three or six questionnaires (depending on the experimental condition) and was
told to stop after either forty-five or ninety minutes. When the subject finished, she
was told that there had been another subject who had had to leave before he could
be told that he was supposed to be paid. The experimenter, who also said he had to
leave, gave the original subject $7 (in dollar bills and coins) and asked her to send the
other subject his money (in the stamped, addressed envelope provided). The subject
was told that the other subject had put in either more, the same, or less time and had
completed more, the same, or fewer questionnaires.
At issue was how much money the original subject would send to the “other”
subject (actually a confederate). Subjects who either worked longer or completed
more questionnaires than the “other” gave the other less than $3.50. It just cannot
be true that, if they had been asked before the experiment, the subjects who worked
longer would have thought that time was more important and subjects who did more
would have thought amount was more important. Subjects apparently seized on any
excuse to see themselves as deserving more. When the original subjects were equal
to the other on both dimensions, they sent almost exactly $3.50, on the average. Only