When fairness prevails
Philosophers and scientists have long puzzled over the origins of fairness. Work by a group of Harvard researchers offers some clues, with the discovery that uncertainty is critical in the concept’s development. Using computer simulations of evolution, researchers at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) — including Director Martin Nowak, scientist David Rand, and junior fellow Corina Tarnita — found that uncertainty is key to fairness. Hisashi Ohtsuki from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Kanagawa, Japan, also contributed to the study. Their work was described in a Jan. 21 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “A number of papers have studied the evolution of fairness over the years,” said Rand, who will begin an assistant professorship at Yale this summer. “Our novel contribution was to take the effects of randomness into account. What we found was that as we turned up the uncertainty in our simulations,...