Their work shows that fair offers activated people’s reward systems, while unfair offers required people to engage their brain’s self-control circuitry to overcome their annoyance and swallow the unfairness.6 In other words, people’s brains had to divert some precious deliberate system capacity to staying calm in the face of the injustice. (And that’s when there’s just $2 at stake.) The bottom line? Ensuring that colleagues feel that workplace decisions are fair not only keeps their reward systems happy, but leaves people with more mental energy to focus on other things.
