Commentary: Fairness is intuitive

Abstract

Cappelen et al. (2015) show that ‘fair’ decisions are quicker than are ‘selfish’ decisions. On this basis, they infer that fairness is ‘intuitive’. We argue that they commit a reverse inference fallacy. One might argue reasonably that, ceteris paribus,intuitive response is faster than deliberative decision—but one may not infer that the faster decision is the more intuitive. We note that fair decisions in their study took on average 38.4 seconds, whereas selfish decisions took 48.5. The decisions were mostly slow, and they do not allow us to discriminate a reflexive response from a consciously controlled decision.