OUR SIXTH SENSE: FAIRNESS

We learn it before we can walk, it helps us collaborate in social groups, and stirs us up on stage and screen ...but is our evolutionary super-power under threat?

‘Do you hear the people sing?  Singing a song of angry men?’

And more to the point, did you hear them singing this Thursday? 

Thursday, March the 26, 2026, was Equal Pay Day in the USA.  The date was arrived as follows:  if an average income-man and an average-income woman started work at the same time on January 1^st 2025, it would take the average-income woman until March the 26^th to match her male counterpart’s earnings total up to 31st December 2025 (e.g. if women earn roughly 83% less than men, they will need to work an extra 17% to make up the difference).

And if you adjust the figure to allow for ethnicity as well as gender you get the following dates in the USA:

This year, Black Women’s Equal Pay Day will fall on July 26, 2026

(because Black women earn 63-66 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men in the States).

And Latina Women’s Equal Pay Day will fall on …October the 8^th 2026 (Hispanic women earn 55-58 cents on the dollar c.f. white, non-Hispanic men).

Oh yes, and size matters too.  For men in higher income economies, on average an extra four inches (In height, guys! Keep it clean!) is associated with roughly 5% more in your pay packet.*

Let’s face it. Inequity is all around us, in spite of Inequity Aversion, ‘the human tendency to dislike unequal outcomes and prefer fairness’ which is hardwired into our brain-boxes and its reward systems.**

And speaking purely professionally (while temporarily putting aside my morality, empathy and personal ethics) for us in The Business of Pleasure, inequality and injustice are simply GREAT for grosses.

The shows Les Misérables, Oliver! and Jesus Christ Superstar can be very clearly linked historically, as iconic pieces of epic-scale musical-theatre story-telling, but at heart (and in their audiences' hearts) their emotional power lies largely in the injustices inflicted on the principal characters, primarily Jean Valjean and Javert, Oliver Twist and Fagin, Jesus and Judas.

…while the Cinema Chapter of The Business of Pleasure has drawn from this emotional well-spring from the days of Chaplin’s Tramp onwards (the image above is from Sidney Lumet’s 1957 jury-room classic Twelve Angry Men).

But what do we know about this evolutionary (and Box Office) super-power, Inequity Aversion and how it works?

Well, as one recent paper** noted in its introduction, we start very young:

'The development of fairness knowledge and behaviour.'

 'Research with young children shows that sensitivity to fair (i.e. equal) distributive outcomes emerges early in development. Within the first two years of life, implicit measures suggest that children expect resources to be distributed equally between other people and appear surprised, as indicated by increased visual attention, when distribution to others are unequal.  15-month-olds look longer when one recipient receives three resources and the other receives one, compared to when each receives two.  Moreover, infants demonstrate preferences for fair distributors, showing increased engagement and positive responses towards individuals who distribute equitably, suggesting a strong preference for equality in resource distribution within the first two years. By the third year of life, this preference for fairness is also observed in explicit judgements. For example, 3-year-olds express preferences for equal distributions when judging other’s resource allocations. Together, these findings suggest that sensitivity and expectations about fairness in how resources should be distributed between other is present early in development.’

And, as another paper*** suggests, this hard-wired default position requires the deployment of precious mental resources in order for us to over-ride it:

‘When facing unfair allocation, individuals have to suppress negative emotional responses to overcome Inequity Aversion (‘the human tendency to dislike unequal outcomes and prefer fairness’) involving conflict regulation and higher cognitive control. Tabibnia et al. (2008) found that accepting unfairness activates self-control circuits. During this process, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (involved in emotion regulation) shows increased activity, while the anterior cingulate cortex (linked to negative emotions) shows decreased activity. Thus, accepting unfairness involves more cognitive control, including inhibiting negative emotions.’

But this ongoing species-wide story, which is minimally several millennia-long, and more likely millions of years in the making, may well have a twist in the tale to match any bestseller from the Mystery Writers’ Chapter of The Business of Pleasure: today’s tech may be weakening our longstanding innate resistance to unfairness. And this isn’t Science Fiction, as the chilling concluding remarks to the 2022 study ‘Algorithmic Discrimination Causes Less Moral Outrage Than Human Discrimination**** points out:

‘The increasing abilities and prevalence of machine-learning based AI and autonomous machines raise new ethical and societal concerns. Here we highlight one of them, the algorithmic deficit. We find that people attribute less prejudiced motivation to algorithms and consequently are less morally outraged by discrimination by algorithms. Beyond the contribution of this research to the study of human-robot interaction, our work has a warning for society. Algorithms carry the promise of being fairer than humans. However, when they are not, people’s defences against injustice might be lowered when the agent is an algorithm, making it easier for discrimination to go unnoticed and unopposed.’

Be that as it may, it will be very much in the best interests of The Business of Pleasure to keep running the red flag up the Inequity Aversion barricade …because I can’t see Alan Price’s Poor People (the theme song from Lindsay Anderson's 1973 classic O Lucky Man!) being better box office than Alain Boublil et al 's Can You Hear The People Sing? any time soon.

Poor people are poor people

And they don’t understand

A man’s got to make whatever he wants

And take it with his own hands

Poor people stay poor people

And they never get to see

Someone’s got to win in the human race

If it isn’t you, then it has to be me

DT 28 March 2026

*This disparity is not purely a matter of direct discrimination, but also reflects correlation as much as causation. For men, height is often a proxy for early life advantages and is also shaped by social bias (leader perception) and behaviours such as confidence.

**...Neuroimaging studies suggest that fair outcomes and behaviours activate brain regions associated with reward processing, such as the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, whereas neural processing of unfair behaviour involves the anterior insula, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex.’ Fairness and Inequity Aversion, Elizabeth Tricomi and Holly Sullivan-Toole, December 2015.

***The emergence of disadvantageous inequity aversion between 2-4 years. Fernando Sánchez Hernández, Daniel C. Hyde. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, May 2026 edition.

****Inequity Aversion Makes Gains Harder: Evidence from Neural dynamics in the ultimatum game Lijuan Chen, Yue Zhuang, Xiang Gao, Xialiu Jiang, Zhihua Huang Fuzhou University, November 20, 2025.