Sense of fairness is universal, finds Mumbai University project

The age-old presumptions of economics, social science and other disciplines on human behaviour are now passé. Challenging them is the country’s first Centre of Experimental Social Science at Mumbai University. From exploring ways to solve co-ordination problems in big projects to mapping archaeological information, the centre, started a year ago, is looking at diverse areas.

“One of the first experiments undertaken by the centre has shown that the idea of fairness is more or less universal. The study involved two diverse groups, tribals in Karjat and Princeton University students,” said professor Neeraj Hatekar, co-ordinator of the centre. In the experiment, the tribals were divided into two groups, A and B.

Individuals in Group A were given Rs100 and were asked to share it with Group B. As per the rules of the experiment, if Group B rejected the share, both groups would be left with nothing.

The same experiment was conducted on the students from Princeton as well. “Normally, we would assume that the group with no money at all would accept anything given to them. But the experiments showed that anything less than 20 per cent would be rejected by both groups.

Hence, individuals in Group A (for both tribals and students) on an average gave 40-45 per cent to the Group B, as they considered it to be ‘fair’,” said Hatekar.

The experiment breaks a common belief that the poor would be happy with any share. Hence economic reforms have to be outlined keeping this in mind, pointed out Hatekar.

“Our experiment showed that if the poor group considered what they received as an ‘unfair’ share, they were ready to punish the richer group even at the cost of punishing themselves. This can be linked to the issue of Maoist problems and others in our country,” he said.

Another major project is to look at scattered information available on social sciences, economics and related fields and see how they can be presented in a more useful format.

As part of this, the centre has undertaken a major study on the formation of the middle class in Maharashtra. “From our research, we have been able to create a continuous time series on the age of marriage of middle class women in the state from 1900 to 1980. What’s interesting is that in the 1920s, the concept of who is an ‘ideal’ girl for marriage changed dramatically in the country, which was emerging as a new nation. So, girls had to be more literate and had to possess some modern skills. Such analysis cannot emerge from a normal census data,” said Hatekar.