How Your Brain Responds to Inequality
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
Of all the brain-exploding aspects of These Times, the thing that infuriates me the most is the unfairness of it all: who suffers disproportionately, who skates by unaffected, and who gets away with things that no one should get away with. The injustice and double standards in this world make me furious.
Turns out there’s an evolutionary reason that being treated unfairly is so rage-inducing — in fact, it’s one of the most primal sources of anger.
The phenomenon is called inequity aversion. Simply put, if you invest the same amount of effort as someone else, you should receive the same reward. This expectation can apply to equal pay for equal work, equal protection from the police officers your taxes have paid for (assuming you’ve paid them), or equal representation in the legal system you’ve adhered to in good faith. When this expectation is violated, you get mad.
Inequity aversion occurs in children as young as three and even in some species of animals, such as monkeys, birds, and dogs. The universality of the response suggests that anger in…
