Is a focus on fairness the answer to bridging the divide?

I recently gave a talk to a group about the work I’m doing to help to bridge the divide in our country. One of the questions afterward was about the difference in interpretations of fairness. The person was referencing the two basic flavors of fairness — equality and merit-based. (If you haven’t read what I write earlier about this before, I suggest that you read this newsletter first so you can better understand what I’ll say now.

The way the question was phrased made it sound dire, as if there’s nothing we can do when people think about things in a different way. She seemed to be saying that conservatives are always going to prefer the merit-based flavor of fairness and liberals will always default to equality. But, is there a way to bridge the gap?

That day, my answer was that we need to become like children in how we deal with fairness. Research with very young children demonstrated that when kids used a merit-based flavor of fairness when effort was involved. But they used an equality-based flavor when no effort was involved. Instead of just defaulting to our natural way of thinking about fairness, we need to learn to use a flavor of fairness that matches the circumstances. In other words, we need to become more flexible.

But I think there’s more to learn here than the immediate answer I gave.

One of the unrecognized problems with the merit-based flavor of fairness is that it isn’t always applied relative to effort. It is also applied to belonging, which comes out as prejudice. Those who belong to the same group we belong to get more. We do more for them, we are more likely to offer them jobs, raises, awards, housing, etc. Now, sometimes belonging-based fairness is good — the fact that I give gifts to my relatives and not to strangers or am willing to put in more effort for my friends is at the root of building community. But when the merit-based flavor of fairness is applied on the basis of belonging to a different race or ethnic group, that’s the source of bias and prejudice.

And what that does is undercut the basic logic of merit-based fairness. Those who work hard, those who achieve great things, aren’t recognized and rewarded if they don’t belong to our group. The story of the kid, that I wrote about in the previous newsletter, who didn’t get to go to the next level of the spelling bee after winning the local contest because he was Black is a great example of the violation of the basic principle of merit-based fairness.

And the concept of using context to determine fairness provides an opening to talk about the subject in a way that matches the default way the person you’re talking to thinks about fairness.

A great way to do that is to ask questions. Become curious. Ask what they think is fair.