Merit and Justice: An Experimental Analysis of Attitude to Inequality

Merit and justice play a crucial role in ethical theory and political philosophy. Some theories view justice as allocation according to merit; others view justice as based on criteria of its own, and take merit and justice as two independent values. We study experimentally how these views are perceived. In our experiment subjects played two games (both against the computer): a game of skill and a game of luck. After each game they observed the earnings of all the subjects in the session, and thus the differences in outcomes. Each subject could reduce the winnings of one other person at a cost. The majority of the subjects used the option to subtract. The decision to subtract and the amount subtracted depended on whether the game was one of skill or luck, and on the distance between the earnings of the subject and those of others. Everything else being equal, subjects subtracted more in luck than in skill. In skill game, but not in luck, the subtraction becomes more likely, and the amount larger, as the distance increases. The results show that individuals considered favorable outcomes in luck to be undeserved, and thus felt more justified in subtracting. In the skill game instead, they considered more favorable outcomes (their own as well as others’) as signal of ability and perhaps effort, which thus deserved merit; hence, they felt less motivated to subtract. However, a larger size of the unfavorable gap from the others increased the unpleasantness of poor performance, which in turn motivated larger subtraction. In conclusion, merit is attributed if and only if effort or skill significantly affect the outcome. An inequality of outcomes is viewed differently depending on whether merit causes the difference or not. Thus, merit and justice are strongly linked in the human perception of social order. OPEN ACCESS Citation: Rustichini A, Vostroknutov A (2014) Merit and Justice: An Experimental Analysis of Attitude to Inequality. PLoS ONE 9(12): e114512. doi:10. 1371/journal.pone.0114512 Editor: Daniel Houser, George Mason University, United States of America Received: December 11, 2013 Accepted: November 10, 2014 Published: December 9, 2014 Copyright: 2014 Rustichini, Vostroknutov. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was supported in part by the NSF grant SES 0924896 to AR. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors confirm that co-author Marieke Wichers is an academic editor of PLOS ONE. This does not alter the authors’ adherence to PLOS ONE Editorial policies and criteria. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0114512 December 9, 2014 1 / 19