Cause of misjudgment № 7
Kantian Fairness Tendency
People expect and extend fair, reciprocal behavior — and react badly when an expected fairness is violated, even at cost to themselves.
Munger named this after Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative — roughly, the idea that you should follow the rules you would want everyone to follow. Humans carry a deep expectation of this kind of reciprocal fairness: we will behave well toward strangers if we trust they will do the same, and we expect others to honor the same unwritten code. A great deal of smooth social cooperation runs on this shared assumption rather than on contracts or enforcement.
The flip side is that violations of expected fairness provoke a sharp, sometimes self-defeating reaction. The everyday example is the orderly line: people queue patiently because everyone is following the same fair rule, and a single person who cuts the line can trigger outrage out of all proportion to the few seconds actually lost. The anger is about the broken rule, not the time. People will sacrifice their own interest to punish the line-cutter or to protest the unfairness.
Recognizing this helps in two ways. As a designer of systems, you can lean on people’s willingness to cooperate when rules are visibly fair and applied to everyone — and you should expect trouble, and reduced cooperation, the moment a process is seen as arbitrary or rigged. As an individual, it is worth noticing when your own sense of “that’s not fair” is driving a costly reaction, and asking whether the principle is worth the price you are about to pay to defend it.
