Research Hit: Fairness in the Brain under Stress

Andy Hab
3 min readAug 6, 2024

New research shows we prefer to help rather than punish when under stress.

You’ve written about fairness before — how does this differ?

Yes, I have written a few times on this. Fairness is important in society. In this post I looked at a circuit for social comparisons:

And this one looked at fairness vs. equity — showing we tend to prefer equity:

But this research I am reporting on wanted to investigate how acute stress can impact fairness decision making.

Ok, explain more

This series of experiments by Huagen Wang et al. combined decision making when viewing unfairness combined with acute stress and brain scanning also.

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Andy Hab
Andy Hab

Written by Andy Hab

Sharing fascinating, fun, and important knowledge on the brain and human behaviour - most days. And masters track athlete - still going strong!

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