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Comment by alienthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

There is something buried deeply in our minds that recoils at being treated unfairly. I have a good job, the pay is decent, the work is interesting - but I'm in the process of looking for a different job because I didn't get a promotion. Some junior members on my team did get them though, and it feels unfair (I absolutely have no idea if they don't deserve it, and I like them as team mates). However, I had previously talked to my about the promotion, set the targets, and went above and beyond to meet those ambitious targets.

I've introspected a bit, and I admit it's weird reaction - nothing changed about my job, except knowing my colleagues were being recognized and getting something I am not. The perverse thing is, if no one got a promotion, I wouldn't be this pissed.

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Wow. I had a similar experience last Monday. A coworker I like personally, but who I consider myself more senior than, was given an important role on the team that I had been working towards and discussing with my manager. I felt this incredible, irrational anger as soon as it was announced and it stuck with me for days. I went to bed angry and woke up angry. It really surprised me how visceral and uncontrollable my reaction felt. It consumed my thoughts. I’m halfway through a four day weekend to disconnect and try to reset myself mentally because while I still think it was unfair, I can’t actively feel this way and still function well at work. Time will tell if this weekend was long enough...

I experienced the same thing more than ten years ago. My coworker and I we were even of the same CS class, and my grades were better than his and I worked two years longer than him in the company but yet he turned out to become my boss.

In my case it seems to be simple to explain why. Have a look at my profile and perhaps you discover the probable cause.

Now I stopped working as an employee and I look forward to never return at slaving away.

One of the companies I worked at previously made a big deal about employee -driven performance review / promo packets every year. Everyone's title had a level like a role playing game. There was also a culture of compensation transparency among coworkers. I thought it was all quite toxic, leading to a lot of very well compensated people stressing out and complaining. At its worst, it lead to instances of passive aggression and depression across many teams.

My current company encourages regular direct feedback, mostly lacks titles internally, and there's a culture of compensation opacity among coworkers. Folk don't talk about money outside topics of general interest, and managers and HR are responsible for periodically reviewing and adjusting compensation for fairness. I haven't had to worry about or discuss money professionally in years, other than to get called into a short meeting to be pleasantly surprised by an adjustment. There's no bonuses other than the occasional verbal praise I receive from appreciative coworkers and management, and I think that's worth more than incrementally more money.

One time I did offer to pay out cash to any coworkers that reduced network traffic on a particularly over-utilized CAN bus, at a bounty of $0.10/Kbps. One sucker, er, respected coworker fell for it. Best $20 I ever spent!

There's a famous psychological experiment where people are split into pairs and given a pot of cash to share. One person decides how it should be apportioned, and the other decides whether to accept that share. If they reject it, neither person receives any money. The logical decision is to always accept the money, because a small amount is still better than nothing. However people don't do that. At a certain point, the desire to punish unfairness outweighs the desire for the money, and people will reject money in order to prevent the unfair person getting anything either.

Is there a task beforehand where participants could potentially do more/less perceived work than their pairs?

On repeated version of game, it pays off to reject unequal deal. So that the other person is incentivized to offer more. So apparently, the desire to punish feeling is optimizing our behavior for repeated game.

Pls, if we are competing in some sense, say socially, then it is better for you to prevent advancement of person you are competing with.

> The logical decision is to always accept the money, because a small amount is still better than nothing

This is a moral decision for me, not a logical one. Someone trying to make you accept an unequal portion is 100% trying to take advantage of you.

The only situation I would accept an unequal share is if the portion was significant enough for the fact that it's unequal to not matter.

Morally you are entitled to zero, so it's still a good deal to take whatever you are offered.

It's not like you both did an equal amount of work. You're not being taken advantage of.

Which is exactly why I'm comfortable turning it down if it's not equal. I didn't lose anything.

Neither person did any work so I don't understand your point. Why would you offer someone less than half the money when you are no more entitled to it than them?

The only reasons I can think of is to take advantage of them settling for less, or because you think you are entitled to more money. Both of which are morally wrong to me.

You write as if "equal" is the objective correct way to distribute.

It is a really fun experiment which they replicated in different cultures and got vastly different results. Even both extremes of the spectrum are good ways to describe expected behaviour in some cultures.

In some places, the first person would take all the money, and the second would happily accept that split. He could have been first after all and would have done the same thing. In other places, the first person would give everything to the second, who would still reject this split. Neither wants to receive money 'undeserved' by being lucky in getting first or second.

All participants would describe their local approach as fair, despite the split definitely not being equal.

I'm explicitly writing from my own moral perspective, which is obviously highly subjective.

I also purposefully didn't use the word "fair" because it's very subjective.

It would definitely be interesting to see the result of this experiment in different cultures. Any sources?

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