Self-serving views on redistributive fairness

Despite the stunning post world-war II economic prosperity, long-standing wealth hierarchies persist both between and within nations. In fact, uprisings of groups with inferior wealth and social status have been routinely suppressed and even retaliated against. However, in cases where grassroots revolutions have succeeded, the first goal of the new elite is to establish and ensure their superior wealth and social status and forget prior feelings of discontent and inferiority. Contrary to these historical observations and lessons, laboratory studies in social sciences repeatedly find that people temper their unadulterated selfishness with genuine concern for fairness. One might ask how a strong preference for relative status and aversion towards inequality can coexist. In the research proposed, we endeavor to explain this seeming contradiction with a novel idea. We posit that because history is complex, it can be self-servingly invoked and interpreted. The degrees of freedom this complexity offers sets the stage for multiple and divergent interpretations of its bearing upon the present. Because parties construe their views about fairness in a self-serving fashion, they are convinced that their interpretation of history and the corresponding notion of fairness is the objectively fair one. We conjecture and test in multiple laboratory experiments that people sharing an asymmetric history such that one party received a superior and the other an inferior outcome in the past tend to self-servingly invoke the implication of their history on how to divide new, jointly-earned money. Specifically, the advantaged party believes that history has no implication on the current division, while the disadvantaged party believes that he should be compensated for his past misfortune. We also intuit and test, that the advantaged party is motivated by preserving his superior social status while the disadvantaged party is driven to decrease the existing wealth-inequality between them. However, when their roles are flipped they are seen to hold double standards. In addition, we expect and test that when parties sharing an asymmetric history fail to get what they believe to be their fair share, they tend to engage in unethical behaviors to compensate for their perceived loss. We believe that demonstrating how the flexible invocation of ones past shapes his fairness preferences could be a missing link in understanding and modeling fairness ideals of haves versus have- nots.

In political economy research, anti-immigrant attitudes are viewed as being driven by natives' distributive concerns and social psychological factors such as discrimination by ethnicity or nationality. The distributive concerns typically revolve around immigration's (perceived) disadvantageous impact on natives' wages and host countries' welfare services. In other words, immigrants are seen as taking away wage potentials and welfare benefits from natives. The psychological factors revolve around various ways of emphasizing differences with respect to cultural background, religion, nationality, birth-country, etc. In two, large-scale economic experiments, we examine the role of such distributive concerns and psychological factors in preferences for immigrants and immigration. From the first experiment, we learned that natives are against sharing welfare benefits with immigrants. This behavior is driven by natives' self-serving beliefs that immigrants are not entitled to welfare service because they have no or little history of building it up. At the same time, we do not find evidence of birth-country-based discrimination against immigrants. In other words, anti-immigrant preferences were entirely driven by the self-serving invocation of the history of building up the welfare benefits. From the second experiment, we learn that natives are willing to accept immigrants if this is beneficial to them economically and they can still maintain their relative wealth rank. In other words, economic incentives and the desire to preserve social status drive natives' preferences for immigration policies. Natives also invoke their own history of building up the state, irrespective of any economic arguments. Those who hold strong anti-immigrant views in real life are less likely to accept immigration even when it is economically beneficial. Our results suggest that anti-immigration preferences are mainly driven by distributional concerns rather than by birth-country-based discrimination. This suggests that immigration policies may focus on the economic impact of immigration and provide salient and clear information on immigration's true (mostly beneficial) impact on the host country's economy. This transparency might also diminish the appeal of radical, anti-immigrant propaganda which plays on the asymmetric contribution history aspect. Additionally, integration programs may put special focus on the labor-market integration of immigrants, leaving no room for them to be seen as net beneficiaries of the welfare state.