We have talked a lot of utility functions and the recent attempts to dig in to them. One interesting off-shoot of this literature has been the examination of preferences for mechanisms and preferences for distribution. Some of the literature has found that people have preferences for fair outcomes and will even destroy personal gain to achieve a more equitable outcome. Other research associated with Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer has argued that people have procedural utility and their well-being is directly influenced by how fair they perceive the mechanism that dealt them their hand. The Journal of Epidemilogy and Community Health has just published a paper showing that a sense of perceived unfairness raises heart risk. The data are from the famous Whitehall study led by Michael Marmot.
http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/61/6/513
To be fair to the authors, they recognise the potential weakness of the findings:
"Further research is needed to disentangle the effects of unfairness from other psychosocial constructs and to investigate the societal, relational and biological mechanisms that may underlie its associations with health and heart disease."
I think the above is understating it somewhat. Even though they have controlled for lots of unobservables, perceived fairness must be related to dozens of underlying unobservables that may imply all manner of different intepretations. In terms of explaining health outcomes using trait variables, there is a lot of work to be done. In economics, we are measuring and using as explanatory variables things like time preferences, risk perception and risk preferences though its unclear where this will ultimately lead .
2 comments:
Unsurprisingly, low employment grade was found to be so strongly related to unfairness. Angela Clow pointed to her finding at this years Irish Health Psychology Conference that cortisol response following failure on a task and subsequent stress induction was amplified only in those with low self-efficacy. This finding could mean that those high in self-efficacy are in a way protected from failure and therefore may also be protected from a sense of unfairness and from the subsequent health effects. Self-efficacy would be an interesting variable to look for in regard to psychological factors in SES and heart protection.
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