Indians are more tolerant of unfairness

What is fair or unfair? Are we a fair people? Do we punish unfairness in others? How do we measure in comparison to other societies? Let us try answering some of these questions.

A vegetable vendor increases the price of onion from Rs25 a kg to Rs45 overnight. Is it unfair? You can’t say unless you know the reason for the price increase.

Suppose there is a truckers’ strike in your city. One vendor increases the price, even though you know he has a large stock of onions already in store. Another vendor who you know does not carry an inventory has had to increase the selling price because he had to pay a much higher purchase price for the onions.

Clearly, you will view the former as unfair, and not the latter. 

Or consider a certain model of car in high demand, with a long waiting line. One dealer, who has been selling this car at the list price, now prices the car Rs25,000 higher due to high demand.

Another dealer, who used to give a dealer’s discount of Rs25,000
earlier, now removes that discount and sells the car at list price. Clearly, you view the former dealer as being unfair.

In short, fairness or unfairness is related to the underlying motive and not just the action. Now relate this example to airlines pricing.
Consider the high prices some of the private airlines charged not very long ago in Leh during the cloud-burst and landslide when thousands of tourists were stranded there.

So are we a fair people? Not very, it would appear. Taking up from a study by Kahneman, I have run this little test numerous times in India and abroad. Let us say, your average tip is X% of the bill in a restaurant. Now you visit a very remote restaurant in a remote country which you are virtually sure you will never visit again. What percentage of the bill will you tip?

When this poser is posed before most western students, the percentage drops very little. While when the same question is posed to Indian students, the average tip dips by as much as 40% — ie, if the average tip was Rs10 on a Rs150 bill, it drops to Rs6 or thereabouts.

Clearly, we are too calculating to be a very fair people. Otherwise, why would those private airlines exploit the stranded passengers in Leh if they were fair? That is why we are not squeamish about jumping queues, because the unfairness of it all does not bother us excessively.

Do we penalise those who are unfair? Not much, it would
appear. Again, consider the following questions. There are two adjacent competing fruit vendors near your apartment block.

One of them shuts down for some reason and as a consequence the other increases his prices by about 15%.

Will you walk an extra 15 minutes to another fruit vendor to make your purchases, in order to penalise the first vendor? This poser elicits a much larger percentage of students responding
in the affirmative in the western countries while students in India typically respond with highly qualified statements or with a counter question: it depends on whether I can drive to this other vendor, or it depends on the time at hand, or “How long are the queues expected to be at the other vendor’s?’ and so on.

Clearly, the unfairness of the vendor and the need to penalise him does not weigh very high with us. That’s also why when you try to discourage a queue jumper, or a bad service provider, you rarely see support from others coming your way.

Our greater unfairness in conduct, higher tolerance of unfairness and greater reluctance to penalise unfairness in others make us all in all a very unfair society.

That’s why perhaps we tolerate so much corruption, that’s why as a society we let so many crooks get away with unfairness and, above all, that’s also perhaps why we are among the most unfair societies in the world.