Exploring how people respond to conflicts between self-interest and fairness: Influence of threats to the self on affective reactions to advantageous inequity

Two studies examined how people deal with conflicts between their self-interest concerns and their striving for fairness. Specifically, the affective reactions to outcome arrangements in which people receive better outcomes than comparable other persons, were studied. These arrangements of advantageous inequity constitute situations in which fairness and self-interest concerns are in conflict. Building on the social psychology of the self, it was predicted, and found, in both field and lab experiments that when people experience a self-threat, they react more positively to arrangements of advantageous inequity than when not experiencing this threat. This supports the view that people's need for positive information about their selves is an important factor in the underlying psychological processes of the way that people deal with conflicts between their fairness and self-interest concerns.