Fairness in groups: Comparing the self-interest and social identity perspectives

Abstract

In both their evaluations and their behavioral choices, people are sensitive to issues of fairness. First, people in this culture and in others evaluate individual actions and social procedures in terms of fairness. A judgment that an action or a procedure is unfair provides us with one reason for modifying it. Some people even maintain that life itself is – or at least "should be" – fair, to the point that President John F. Kennedy's declaration during the 1961 Berlin crisis that "life is not fair" was widely considered to be an act of political courage.