As the bankster phenomenon has so eloquently illustrated, Homo sapiens is exquisitely sensitive to injustice.【F1】
Many people grudgingly tolerated the astronomical incomes of financial traders, and even the cos-mological ones of banks' chief executives, when they thought those salaries were earned by honest labour.
Now, so many examples to the contrary have emerged that toleration has vanished.
【F2】
Surprisingly, however, the psychological underpinnings of a sense of injustice—in particular, what triggers willingness to punish an offender, even at a cost to the punisher—have not been well established.
But a recent experiment by Nichola Raihani of University College, London, and Katherine McAuliffe of Harvard, just published in Biology Letters, attempts to disentangle the matter.
Dr. Raihani and Ms. McAuliffe tested two competing hypotheses. One is that the desire to punish is simple revenge for an offence. The other is that it is related to the offence' s consequences—specifically, whether or not the offender is left better off than the victim.
Until recently, the temptation would have been to advertise for undergraduate volunteers for such a project. Instead, Dr. Raihani and Ms. McAuliffe decided to follow a new fashion in psychology and recruit their human guinea pigs through a system called Mechanical Turk. This arrangement, run by Amazon, a large internet firm, pays people registered with it (known as Turkers) small sums of money to do jobs for others.【F3】
That allowed the two researchers not only to gather many more volunteers (560) than would have been possible from the average student body, but also to spread the profile of those volunteers beyond the halls of academe and beyond the age of 21.
【F4】
On the face of things, this result suggests that what really gets people' s goat is not so much having money taken, but having it taken in a way that makes the taker better off than the victim.
That will clearly bear further investigation, for example by looking at the case where the first player begins the game better off than the second.【F5】
It is intriguing, though, that even such trivial sums of money can provoke thoughts ofrevenge.
In light of this, the fate awaiting those astronomically paid bankers could be a particularly nasty one.