Winners overlook lack of fairness in fixed game

WA SHINGTON» When it comes to fairness and privilege, a new study finds it really is not about how you play the game. It’s about whether you win or lose.

A new experiment, played out as a card game, shows that even when the deck is literally stacked in people’s favor — and they know it — most winners still think it’s fair anyway. Losers don’t, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances.

The research shows how people who have advantages in life can give themselves too much credit in explaining how they got so far, Bates College sociologist Emily Kane said.

It all started when some Cornell University sociology students and lead author Mario D. Molina created a card game that would take away randomness and reward winners by letting them discard their worst cards and take away the losers’ best cards. Nearly 1,000 players were shown how it works and how the game was rigged to help the winners.

The players were asked if the game was fair, based on luck or based on skill. Molina said 60 percent of the winners thought the game was fair, compared with 30 percent of the losers. And winners attributed winning to talent three times more often than losers. Once the game got more unfair, with a second round of card exchanges to further benefit the winners, far fewer winners thought the game was fair. Molina called that “the Warren Buffett effect,” after the billionaire who has called for higher taxes on the rich to level the playing field.

The message of the study was pessimistic, said Eliot Smith, brain sciences professor at Indiana University: People have problems making judgments about fairness when it benefits them.