Popular Science News | Humans are born to act fairly

Popular Science News – ‘life ain’t fair’ but people are, at least until they learn to act differently. Patricia Kanngiesser from the University of Bristol studied 3-year-old children at play and was surprised by her findings. She set up a simple game in which the child and a puppet, operated by a puppeteer, collected coins which the child exchanged for an equal number of prized stars. The child was then instructed to share them with the puppet. It was observed that the child shared the stickers according to how hard the puppet worked in collecting the coins.

The reason for this innate fairness seems to be in order to develop stable relationships Dr Susanne Shultz, a researcher from the University of Manchester, believed. “Co-operation and fairness are fundamental aspects of human behaviour,” she explained. However, in humans alone, not in other species, cheating and deception was used to punish others they believed had treated them unfairly.

So, it looks as if we were born to be fair but then decided who to cheat and deceive. According to researchers, we choose to con people because we believe that they have been unfair to us, even if there was no evidence they had done anything wrong to us. I hate to say it but it seems as if some people have a chip on their shoulder and so the people around them end up being cheated because of it. If we were to closely study the people involved in scamming property victims in north Cyprus, in my opinion, we’d find that they were serial deceivers who, to justify their cheating, bought into the theory that ‘life ain’t fair’. Interesting theory, anyone want to do the research?

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