Winners overlook rigged games’ lack of fairness, study finds
Posted July 17, 2019 1:19 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
WASHINGTON — 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 favour — and they know it — most winners still think it’s fair anyway. Losers don’t.
Sociologists at Cornell University created a game that rewards winners by letting them discard their worst cards and take away the losers’ best cards.
The players were asked if the game was fair, based on luck or based on skill. Sixty per cent of the winners thought the game was fair, compared with 30% of the losers.
The study is in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances.
By Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press
