Primates, too, manifest something akin to a sense of fairness. Brosnan and De Waal, for example, have shown that two monkeys (who like cucumbers, but love grapes) will eat their cucumbers peacefully until one of them is given a grape instead, in which case the other will promptly reject their cucumber! Friederike Range and her colleagues at the University of Vienna in Austria similarly showed that dogs who were normally happy to repeatedly ‘give the paw' whether or not they got rewarded stopped cooperating if they saw that another dog was being rewarded with a piece of food, while they received nothing.

What I am glimpsing in the Wall Street protests is an emotional reaction of distress and rage in the face of starkly expanding conditions of social unfairness. Framed as such, it's clear that the protesters are not, as is alleged in some quarters, ‘rich haters' but rather ‘unfairness haters.' They don't hate the game; they hate the fact that the game is rigged. The question of fairness here is only incidentally related to the specific issue of wealth distribution. Fairness is a process issue, while wealth distribution is mere content. You can establish a fair or unfair system for any content field. A healthy society strives to create fair processes in all its important content areas-from competition on the football field to a justice system that works the same way for everyone.

Fairness, as it pertains to process, is content neutral. Thus, contrary to popular belief, the demonstrations may have little to do with the current recession. The recent protests in Israel, for example, which seems to have inspired the American movement, occurred against a background of national economic prosperity. Israel is booming economically, with low inflation and unemployment, little debt, and healthy growth rates. However, the feeling of the citizenry is that most of the money generated by the hard work and joint effort of the many ends up in the hands of only a few, who then cement their hold on the goods by buying the means of production-the factory, industry, and real estate assets-and then use their accumulated power and wealth to buy access to the government and shape the rules of the economy in their favor. That is unfair, just as it would be unfair if a team that won the super bowl got to rig the rules of football to ensure they kept on winning.

Similarly, a policy's fairness is not necessarily linked to its effectiveness. A policy can be very effective yet patently unfair, or vice versa. The fact that Bush's bank bail-out was rationally justified as an economic policy and probably saved the banking system does not negate the visceral sense of unfairness we feel in our bones: a system where the few who screwed over the many are rewarded and their rewards are paid for by the people who got screwed, is unfair.

It is important to note that when the protesters rage against unfairness, they are not raging against inequality per se. Inequality, although it may be uncomfortable, in itself is not always unfair or undesirable. In fact, the evidence suggests that some level of inequality, even if uncomfortable, may motivate and direct our actions to positive ends. Too much inequality, however, offends our sense of fairness. This type of curvilinear relationship is common in the human experience. According to the famous Yerkes and Dodson law, for example, some arousal is important for performance. Too much arousal, however, stifles performance. Some hunger will get you motivated to search for food. Constant, severe, chronic hunger will deform your brain and your body permanently, and drain your motivation.

We know this pattern from our daily lives. There's nothing wrong with your partner having a glass of wine at dinner. Three bottles of wine at dinner feels quite different. Raising your voice once in a while to get your child's immediate attention-that's parenting. Screaming at the top of your lungs at your child as a matter of course-that's abuse.

Looked at in this way, one realizes also that what we are witnessing now in America is not the old, tired battle between socialists, liberals, and Europhiles who want ‘equal outcome' on one side and traditionalist, conservative capitalist Americans who cherish the creed of ‘equal opportunity.' Americans in general have been, and remain, open to the basic notion that those who work harder should be rewarded more; those who are talented and contribute more should be rewarded more. This culture has no difficulty seeing the benefits of an open market system in terms of motivating people to do their best, work hard, innovate, excel, and contribute. And it continues to admire those winners. The problem is that right now, many of those who get more appear to get way too much more, and do not seem to be contributing all that much, and much of their effort, after winning, is dedicated to rigging the game so as to ensure that no one else gets a real turn at bat.

Interestingly, unfairness and inequity ultimately hurt both victim and victimizer. This notion is not as peculiar as it initially sounds. Theodore Roosevelt appears to have recognized it intuitively when he said: "This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in." Here's a commonly observed dynamic in romantic relationships: if your partner loves you much more than you love them, you will in short order begin to feel guilty about the unfairness of the situation. Guilt is uncomfortable, and we don't like to feel uncomfortable; so after a while, you will turn on the source of your discomfort, in this case, your ultra-loving partner. End of relationship.