How the Desire for “Fairness” Prevents You from Having Success
We all want to be treated “fairly” in life. In fact, it’s a basic tenet of self-esteem, don’t let others walk all over you. Don’t play “victim” and when you are being treated “unfairly”, call others on it.
That is a “fair” way to look at things and there’s certainly nothing wrong with this perspective.
But what happens when our sense of “fairness” turns dogmatic becomes more about our “egos” and our desire to always be the “winner” in a very limited and narrow sense?
In these cases, our sense of “fairness” can actually prevent us from being successful in life because it limits our point of view to a very arbitrary and superficial idea of “fairness”.
If what was written above confuses you, just keep on reading about an experiment performed in the 1970’s by social scientists, that later came to be termed “the justice mechanism”.
The Justice Mechanism
This is the primary block that most people have that prevents them from being successful. The “justice mechanism” is a term coined by social scientists to define the feeling that most people have of wanting to be treated “fairly” in all of their business transactions. However, while the desire to be treated “fairly” is certainly legitimate and not at all wrong, it is sometimes overly dogmatic and egotistically determined.
What exactly is meant by “overly dogmatic and egotistically determined”?
Consider this experiment performed by social scientists in the late seventies and repeated various times since all over the world in many different countries and types of cultures around the world.
The original experiment was performed in the U.S. in the 1970’s. It involved taking a group of participants, pairing them up, and giving each pair $100. The pair had to decide how to split the $100 equally between the two of them.
The rules were that participant A would have the power to decide how to split the money. “A” could decide to split it any way they wanted – i.e. 50/50, 90/10, 60 /40 – in short any way that they desired at all, there were no rules whatsoever about how they had to split it.
The catch was that participant B had all the power to either accept “A’s” decision or veto it. If “B” wasn’t happy with the way that “A” would decide to split the money, then “B” had the power to nullify everything and if that happened, then no one got anything at all.
What scientists discovered was that in 90% of the cases, “A” would choose to split 50/50 and “B” would accept and both would walk away from the table happy and $50 richer each.
But in some cases, “A” would decide, for whatever reason, not to split the money evenly and “A” would want more than 50% of the money and leave “B” with a much smaller percentage.
In all of these cases, every single one, without exception, “B” would null and void “A’s” decision and prefer to walk away with no money than to accept less than 50%.
Now some of you at this point may be nodding your heads in agreement with “B” and feeling they did the “right” thing because anything less than 50% is not “fair”.
But here’s the key perspective that’s often overlooked by this point of view.
It was free money that none of them had to begin with and the fact that they were both going to get this money for “free” and with no work or effort on their part to have it was not something to be taken for granted. It was a “lucky break” and “easy” money that was not going to come their way again.
So really, if you look at the situation objectively, considering that this is going to be “free” and “easy” money, wouldn’t gaining any amount of money be better than walking away with no money at all?
After all, even if “B” got less than 50% of the money, “B” would still be walking away from the table $10 or $40 richer, wouldn’t they? And that is $10 or $40 more than what they had when they walked into the room. They would still be coming out winning only if they would just put their egos aside and not worry so much about things being “fair” in an arbitrary sense. After all, the argument could be made that it was still “fair” to get $10 or $40 that they didn’t work for nor make any effort to gain on their part.
Yet, in all cases, none of the participant B’s even considered this point of view.
So the social scientists thought that perhaps it was because the U.S. was a first-world country and $100 was really nothing worth gaining in terms of livelihood. They decided to perform the experiment in a third-world country where $100 meant, at least, a month’s worth of salary.
But to their shock, the results were the same. The experiment was then expanded to various cultures and countries around the world and still, the results invariably came back the same.
Which pointed to the fact that the “justice mechanism” is an internal block we all have that prevents us from truly having success.
Rather than being concerned all the time about “fairness” and getting what we “deserve”, be more concerned with the greater value of things and look at the greater things we gain from engaging in transactions where we may not necessarily get 50/50 out of it. Not everything in life can be determined by an arbitrary sense of “fairness” where all benefits are split 50/50. There are times when the gain, while initially it may seem to be less than 50/50, can actually be greater when viewed from a long-term perspective.
Source: http://www.mlmtipsandadvice.com.au/desire-%e2%80%9cfairness%e2%80%9d-prevents-success/





