Fair Shares: Accountability and Cognitive Dissonance in Allocation Decisions

Everyone has observed people invoking fair-ness arguments in defense of their opinions or actions, and it is not uncommon for such argu-ments to be wielded on both sides of an issue about which views conflict. For example, dur-ing a televised debate Representative Charles B. Rangel said, “I think [Affirmative Action] has to involve a search for fairness, ” whereas com-mentator Avi Nelson opined that “you promote more unfairness than fairness when you depart from the basic criterion, which is that individ-uals should be treated as individuals ” (Annen-