The Rules: There are 2 participants in each experiment. One of them must receive a good reward (such as a candy bar), one must receive a punishment of doing something undesirable (such as writing the same sentence 100 times).
One participant is given the opportunity to EITHER choose whether to assign the prize unilaterally, OR to flip a coin so that the prizes are decided fairly. The other participant would not know whether the coin was flipped or the prize was assigned unilaterally.
The majority of participants opted for flipping the coin, because it was more fair, BUT in 85% of the coin flips, the prize was awarded in the flippers favor. So it would seem that APPEARING fair is more important to the participant than actually BEING fair.
In similar blind studies, when the deciding participant was given complete privacy from the experimentors, the participant chose the reward over the punishment.
Equality and Fairness are ideals that we embrace... to a point.
