I almost ignored this due to the sloganized, hard-to-understand title and the unreliability of the site. But the study actually seems pretty good, and the paper is well-written and open-access [1].
Whenever my RSS reader shows me an article from phys.org and the article is open access I decide if I want to post the phys.org article or the paper, this was a toughie. A common situation is that the phys.org headline is "Scientists come to some conclusion" and the title of the paper was "We measured something"; this one was a tough call, I bet it would have gotten <5 upvotes had I posted a link right to the paper.
Sometimes phys.org articles are absolutely great, sometimes they suck, sometimes they run articles off the AP wire or from a university press release. Their advertising is reprehensible, but I've looked at the alternatives and most of them are much worse, it's one reason why phys.org and related sites are on the list of top sites submitted to HN by people other than myself, not just the list of top sites I submit to HN. (I post enough that I really have to take stats ex-myself because for some sites, like coindesk, I post most of them)
It's not free rider but coordination costs -- the same reason democracies are at a disadvantage relative to authoritarian regimes.
Transaction cost ecomomics has been studying this and other transactions features since before 1965. Key to their methodology and success is comparing actual to actual alternatives, instead of actual to imagined.
They're not. Representative democracies elect representatives who can do anything a dictator can do, modulo constitutional constraints which exist because allowing the government to do those things is a disadvantage.
And most problems aren't coordination problems to begin with. How do you get someone to grow food and someone else to build housing? Pay them for it, so the person growing food has money to buy housing and vice versa. It operates perfectly well as a decentralized system.
The primary fault in governments is the principal-agent problem. The government is supposed to be acting in the interest of the people but ends up acting in the interest of government officials or special interests. Democracies are not immune from this at all but dictatorships are certainly no better.
Yeah, one corollary is that membership-oriented groups like Greenpeace, the NRA, PIRG and such are not effective at representing member’s interests because they have no way of communicating displeasure other than leaving whereas the sponsor of something like
It's almost as if one could point at the failure of progressive liberalism to be due to these placeholder organizations that collect membership, member time, member dues, and then perhaps produce some showy PR, seed the press with some outrage media, and then they go home. They are worse than nothing, because they occupy the place of something better than their "in statement only" existence.
True in most countries. The president or more generally the chief of the executive often has legal immunity. It makes sense because that are the law, at least in part.
In democracies there a usually some protection against abuse of that power (ex: impeachment).
You're conflating a president (highest executive) with a monarch. Perhaps on purpose given current goings on, but a key distinction between monarchies and democracies is explicitly that all people in the country are subject to the same laws and there is no sovereign immunity.
The Monarch also needs permission from the Mayor of the City of London to enter the city, so we do need to make a distinction between de jure and de facto law here.
> It is sometimes asserted that the Lord Mayor may exclude the monarch from the City of London. This legend is based on the misinterpretation of the ceremony observed each time the sovereign enters the City at Temple Bar, when the Lord Mayor presents the City's Pearl Sword to the sovereign as a symbol of the latter's overlordship. The monarch does not, as is often purported, wait for the Lord Mayor's permission to enter the City. When the sovereign enters the City, a short ceremony usually takes place where the Lord Mayor presents a sword to the monarch, symbolically surrendering their authority. If the sovereign is attending a service at St Paul's Cathedral this ceremony would take place there rather than at the boundary of the City, simply for convenience.
I'd like to see add on study on 'Banality of Evil'.
Here "The willingness of those in power to act fairly depends on how easily others can collectively push back against unfair treatment, psychologists have found."
What about all the the middle managers that enable the powerful.
The more the middle layer of population supports the powerful, the less the 'masses' can revolt to enforce fairness.
All revolutions are actually started by the middle class which gets upset. The true lower class masses never have the resources to get off the ground.
A buffer class of courtiers. If you got rid of every powerful dictatorial elite with one magical bolt of lightning, the upper-middle class would have new ones chosen by the end of the day.
Yes, this is a trivial consequence of social reproduction theory.
It's one of the reasons why change is so difficult. Changing one portion of society creates an impedance mismatch between it and the rest. The changed part eventually gets realigned to the whole once again.
We're still just apes with hats. Very complicated hats, but it's still an ape wearing it. You can teach a few apes a whole lot of tricks, but it takes a lot. Most of the apes won't learn much. The few smart apes will learn tricks and incentives, which when properly applied, allow those few smart apes to control the rest of the apes. That control is called society.
Until we graduate past our innate predator prey dynamic, this unsavory civilization is the best it gets. Consider yourself lucky to be capable of reading this at all.
The only option is to build something that doesn’t act like this before that happens, but most likely we will just make a less accountable less empathetic version of humanity
"Results suggest that the ease of collective action induces more egalitarian behavior by individuals in a position of power and makes those without power less willing to accept unfairness."
This is why capitalists dislike unions so much, becasue they know this. Together we are stronger.
> This is why capitalists dislike unions so much, beca[us]e they know this.
No, the reason why capitalists hate unions so much is that it is another layer of incredibly annoying bureaucrats that you have to get along with.
What you describe might rather be the reason why people who have dark triad traits don't like unions; these people often are not "convinced capitalists", but rather people who use capitalism (or whatever the current system is) to their advantage.
I'd argue that unions can help an area be more competitive.
Any carpenter or handyman could nail together a stage for a movie, but members of the Carpenters Local 213 in LA are experts at efficiently building that kind of temporary structure and they do it efficiently. What would be a difficult HR problem in most places is just "call the union hall" in Hollywood; it has some costs, but it has some benefits.
> No, the reason why capitalists hate unions so much is that it is another layer of incredibly annoying bureaucrats that you have to get along with.
I will never understand this perception. You think there is no bureaucracy in businesses? They want to be the sole bureaucrat is all, so getting rid of all other bureaucrats makes them more profit.
Bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned.
Capitalism favors dark triad traits. What capitalist doe snot use capitalism for their own advantage?
> He added, however, that it is important to remember the limitations of such studies: "We used point/money to represent the real-life costs associated with actions like campaigning or going on a protest march. Experiments like these are only meant to simulate aspects of the real world, not perfectly represent its complexity."
> Behavior may be different if participants had earned their points rather than simply received them, or both Proposers and Responder shared a common identity or wider goal.
> "Still," Dr. Gordon continues, "it is a reminder that we should be mindful of attempts to limit the ability to hold power to account. For example, through anti-protest, anti-strike, and voter suppression laws. In an era marked by growing global inequality, this study offers critical insights into the psychology of power, and the mechanisms that can promote more equitable societies."
“The ease with which people can challenge authority significantly shapes how those in power behave” known in 19th century as “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The speed at which the so-called “authoritarian regime” ended lockdown the moment significant protests began.
I feel like fairness is what anyone can get away with and powerful people just tend to get away with more. Even the article seems to land on this conclusion.
They are also powerful compared to you in other ways. Homeless person can get away with being intoxicated in public for example or various other technical crimes that come hand in hand with sleeping rough.
Interesting crossover in how Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind highlighted fairness as being the primary moral axis for conservatives, as opposed to caring and harm reduction for liberals. If that fairness is ultimately defined and measured in terms of raw social power then, well ... hmm.
I almost ignored this due to the sloganized, hard-to-understand title and the unreliability of the site. But the study actually seems pretty good, and the paper is well-written and open-access [1].
[1] https://spb.psychopen.eu/index.php/spb/article/view/11607
Whenever my RSS reader shows me an article from phys.org and the article is open access I decide if I want to post the phys.org article or the paper, this was a toughie. A common situation is that the phys.org headline is "Scientists come to some conclusion" and the title of the paper was "We measured something"; this one was a tough call, I bet it would have gotten <5 upvotes had I posted a link right to the paper.
Sometimes phys.org articles are absolutely great, sometimes they suck, sometimes they run articles off the AP wire or from a university press release. Their advertising is reprehensible, but I've looked at the alternatives and most of them are much worse, it's one reason why phys.org and related sites are on the list of top sites submitted to HN by people other than myself, not just the list of top sites I submit to HN. (I post enough that I really have to take stats ex-myself because for some sites, like coindesk, I post most of them)
I ended up clicking through because I saw your name!
Thinking about it now I'm surprised that Mancur Olsen doesn't get mentioned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
as his theory is precisely about how when collective action is difficult people don't do it.
Right effect, wrong mechanism.
It's not free rider but coordination costs -- the same reason democracies are at a disadvantage relative to authoritarian regimes.
Transaction cost ecomomics has been studying this and other transactions features since before 1965. Key to their methodology and success is comparing actual to actual alternatives, instead of actual to imagined.
> the same reason democracies are at a disadvantage relative to authoritarian regimes.
Are they? There aren't very many examples of successful authoritarian regimes. Singapore and China?
They're not. Representative democracies elect representatives who can do anything a dictator can do, modulo constitutional constraints which exist because allowing the government to do those things is a disadvantage.
And most problems aren't coordination problems to begin with. How do you get someone to grow food and someone else to build housing? Pay them for it, so the person growing food has money to buy housing and vice versa. It operates perfectly well as a decentralized system.
The primary fault in governments is the principal-agent problem. The government is supposed to be acting in the interest of the people but ends up acting in the interest of government officials or special interests. Democracies are not immune from this at all but dictatorships are certainly no better.
Very insightful. 1965 was an interesting time to write this book too with welfare being passed around then.
This is an incredibly sad read.
Yeah, one corollary is that membership-oriented groups like Greenpeace, the NRA, PIRG and such are not effective at representing member’s interests because they have no way of communicating displeasure other than leaving whereas the sponsor of something like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network
Has a meaningful voice. See another book from about the same time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
It's almost as if one could point at the failure of progressive liberalism to be due to these placeholder organizations that collect membership, member time, member dues, and then perhaps produce some showy PR, seed the press with some outrage media, and then they go home. They are worse than nothing, because they occupy the place of something better than their "in statement only" existence.
I'm reminded of the nixon quote: "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal."
It was aspirational then, but after 50 years of working to create the Unitary Executive it is now fact.
Only if we let it be fact. Surely there’s a line.
That line was crossed when we re-elected Mr. January 6th.
Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest!
The German people of the 1930s would like to have a word...
There isn't.
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True in most countries. The president or more generally the chief of the executive often has legal immunity. It makes sense because that are the law, at least in part.
In democracies there a usually some protection against abuse of that power (ex: impeachment).
The UK has sovereign immunity.
The monarch is literally above the law. They cannot be arrested, questioned, tried, or punished for any reason.
Of course it would raise eyebrows if King Charles went on a shooting spree. But what happens behind closed doors is none of the public's business.
Reality: If His Maj just doesn't look fit for purpose, then he can be suspended. Or forced off the throne entirely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_Act_1811#Care_of_King_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdication_of_Edward_VIII
You're conflating a president (highest executive) with a monarch. Perhaps on purpose given current goings on, but a key distinction between monarchies and democracies is explicitly that all people in the country are subject to the same laws and there is no sovereign immunity.
The Monarch also needs permission from the Mayor of the City of London to enter the city, so we do need to make a distinction between de jure and de facto law here.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Mayor_of_London
> It is sometimes asserted that the Lord Mayor may exclude the monarch from the City of London. This legend is based on the misinterpretation of the ceremony observed each time the sovereign enters the City at Temple Bar, when the Lord Mayor presents the City's Pearl Sword to the sovereign as a symbol of the latter's overlordship. The monarch does not, as is often purported, wait for the Lord Mayor's permission to enter the City. When the sovereign enters the City, a short ceremony usually takes place where the Lord Mayor presents a sword to the monarch, symbolically surrendering their authority. If the sovereign is attending a service at St Paul's Cathedral this ceremony would take place there rather than at the boundary of the City, simply for convenience.
"I'm not gonna do it, but I need the legal ability to murder innocent people"
We used to have the concept of the divine right of kings. The current arrangements are a step down from that. Your framing has it back to front.
I'd like to see add on study on 'Banality of Evil'.
Here "The willingness of those in power to act fairly depends on how easily others can collectively push back against unfair treatment, psychologists have found."
What about all the the middle managers that enable the powerful.
The more the middle layer of population supports the powerful, the less the 'masses' can revolt to enforce fairness.
All revolutions are actually started by the middle class which gets upset. The true lower class masses never have the resources to get off the ground.
A buffer class of courtiers. If you got rid of every powerful dictatorial elite with one magical bolt of lightning, the upper-middle class would have new ones chosen by the end of the day.
Yes, this is a trivial consequence of social reproduction theory.
It's one of the reasons why change is so difficult. Changing one portion of society creates an impedance mismatch between it and the rest. The changed part eventually gets realigned to the whole once again.
n=256 undergraduates playing “The Ultimatum Game.”
The headline (“fairness is what the powerful can get away with”) is a tad lofty given the methodology of the study.
Isn't the flip-side of this "The powerful do not do what they will be held accountable for"?
Yes, everyone does what they can get away with in a mixed-incentive game.
So this is just Thrasymachus - "Justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger"?
We have not evolved far beyond the same problems that bedeviled Socrates and his interlocutors, have we?
> We have not evolved
We're still just apes with hats. Very complicated hats, but it's still an ape wearing it. You can teach a few apes a whole lot of tricks, but it takes a lot. Most of the apes won't learn much. The few smart apes will learn tricks and incentives, which when properly applied, allow those few smart apes to control the rest of the apes. That control is called society.
Until we graduate past our innate predator prey dynamic, this unsavory civilization is the best it gets. Consider yourself lucky to be capable of reading this at all.
There’s no graduation, Humans will go extinct
The only option is to build something that doesn’t act like this before that happens, but most likely we will just make a less accountable less empathetic version of humanity
our memory truly only lasts a generation or two
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
-- George Orwell, Animal Farm
"Results suggest that the ease of collective action induces more egalitarian behavior by individuals in a position of power and makes those without power less willing to accept unfairness."
This is why capitalists dislike unions so much, becasue they know this. Together we are stronger.
> This is why capitalists dislike unions so much, beca[us]e they know this.
No, the reason why capitalists hate unions so much is that it is another layer of incredibly annoying bureaucrats that you have to get along with.
What you describe might rather be the reason why people who have dark triad traits don't like unions; these people often are not "convinced capitalists", but rather people who use capitalism (or whatever the current system is) to their advantage.
I'd argue that unions can help an area be more competitive.
Any carpenter or handyman could nail together a stage for a movie, but members of the Carpenters Local 213 in LA are experts at efficiently building that kind of temporary structure and they do it efficiently. What would be a difficult HR problem in most places is just "call the union hall" in Hollywood; it has some costs, but it has some benefits.
A distinction without a difference to anyone observing a "convinced capitalist" from the outside.
> No, the reason why capitalists hate unions so much is that it is another layer of incredibly annoying bureaucrats that you have to get along with.
I will never understand this perception. You think there is no bureaucracy in businesses? They want to be the sole bureaucrat is all, so getting rid of all other bureaucrats makes them more profit.
Bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned.
Capitalism favors dark triad traits. What capitalist doe snot use capitalism for their own advantage?
Corporate Psychopathy: The Dark Triad Traits in Business Leaders https://scribe.rip/psychologs-magazine/corporate-psychopathy...
Surely this will replicate...
> He added, however, that it is important to remember the limitations of such studies: "We used point/money to represent the real-life costs associated with actions like campaigning or going on a protest march. Experiments like these are only meant to simulate aspects of the real world, not perfectly represent its complexity."
> Behavior may be different if participants had earned their points rather than simply received them, or both Proposers and Responder shared a common identity or wider goal.
> "Still," Dr. Gordon continues, "it is a reminder that we should be mindful of attempts to limit the ability to hold power to account. For example, through anti-protest, anti-strike, and voter suppression laws. In an era marked by growing global inequality, this study offers critical insights into the psychology of power, and the mechanisms that can promote more equitable societies."
“The ease with which people can challenge authority significantly shapes how those in power behave” known in 19th century as “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The speed at which the so-called “authoritarian regime” ended lockdown the moment significant protests began.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_makes_right
I feel like fairness is what anyone can get away with and powerful people just tend to get away with more. Even the article seems to land on this conclusion.
>Even the article seems to land on this conclusion.
But the title landed in the next county because that's what the editor's job is in the modern era of clicks and eyeballs.
Yeah, that’s what I was alluding to. There had to be a slight, “you’re getting screwed,” angle to it.
you are also powerful compared to the homeless guy on the street, does this study also evaluate this?
They are also powerful compared to you in other ways. Homeless person can get away with being intoxicated in public for example or various other technical crimes that come hand in hand with sleeping rough.
fairness does not exist and is impossible to describe or define, and so it needs a decider, every time, and that is just power over others.
fairness is the nastyest dirty trick ever invented
"Fa(ir|re) is what you pay to ride a bus"--LT Nicholson.
Interesting crossover in how Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind highlighted fairness as being the primary moral axis for conservatives, as opposed to caring and harm reduction for liberals. If that fairness is ultimately defined and measured in terms of raw social power then, well ... hmm.
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Just in time for the Epstein Kompromat op to go full Streisand Effect.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/12/politics/trump-epstein-re...