You know how those dad-isms just show up in your head from time to time? Well, one in my house growing up was some variation on: "Life isn't fair." I heard it plenty.
Turns out it's pretty decent advice! Changing your expectation of what constitutes "fair" is the best fairness as social threat management technique—when you expect that "unfair" is about as fair as fair gets, you're on the path to not being surprised by it.
But dang, I also remember that deep-rooted feeling that immediately preceded those words. It was hot. It was deep.
It's that same heat when your colleague gets credit for your idea, when you're on the wrong side of an arbitrary promotion decision, or when company policies apply differently to different people …
Fairness threats are intense.
"We crave fairness," writes Dr. David Rock in Your Brain at Work. So much so that: "A sense of unfairness can generate a threat response that lasts for days."
Days. Not minutes. Not hours. Days. That's a long time until recovery.
That's what makes fairness—the F in Dr. Rock's SCARF framework—uniquely challenging. While other social threats do more spiking and fading, unfairness hikes deep into your brain and sets up camp.
The Fairness Obsession
Like all elements of the SCARF framework, fairness triggers both threat and reward responses. When fairness is present, it activates the same reward systems as public praise or an unexpected bonus, flooding your system with dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. This experience of fairness creates a "toward" emotional state—you become more open to new ideas, more willing to connect with others, more collaborative. Fairness is a major driver of behavior—more than people typically expect. It influences everything from team collaboration to individual performance to organizational loyalty.
When unfairness strikes, however, it arouses the limbic system, and if you've read anything else I've written about the SCARF framework you know what comes next: resources get diverted away from the prefrontal cortex, and your capacity for the complex thinking your work requires diminishes significantly.
Steven Pinker suggests our fairness response emerged as a byproduct of our ancestors' need to trade efficiently. Those who could detect unfair exchanges—and avoid getting cheated—had better survival odds. As a result, our modern brains have sophisticated unfairness detection systems that operate whether we're trading cattle or collaborating on quarterly reports.
This detection system can create a workplace challenge that goes beyond individual reactions. As Dr. Rock notes, "So many structures inside organizations, especially large organizations, work against employees feeling a sense of fairness. The all-too-common complaints about pay, performance, and transparency are certainly linked to fairness."
The intensity gets amplified when you're already stressed. "Since fairness packs a hefty punch," Dr. Rock warns, "it's easy to get upset by small injustices when you're tired, or when your limbic system already has a strong base load of arousal." A minor slight that you'd normally brush off can feel like a major violation when your neural circuits are already overloaded.
Recognizing and Managing Fairness Threats
Here's what makes a fairness threat feel different from the others: they carry a distinct moral weight. You don't just feel threatened—you feel wronged, even betrayed. This moral dimension is what gives fairness violations their staying power and intensity.
Dr. Rock warns: "You may find that once you prime your prefrontal cortex to look out for fairness issues they start to appear everywhere."
This hypervigilance makes sense from a survival perspective, but it can turn your workplace into a minefield of perceived injustices. What makes this even more complex is something Dr. Rock's research reveals about fairness itself: it's not about absolute outcomes—it's about the gap between your expectations and reality.
You can receive a promotion and still feel deeply unfair treatment if someone else got a bigger title bump. Your team can get praised, but if the credit distribution doesn't match your mental model of contributions, that can sting. You can get the outcome you wanted through a process that violated your sense of "how things should work," and success feels tainted.
This is the fairness paradox: our brains run constant predictive models about fair outcomes based on past experiences, social comparisons, cultural norms, and personal values. When reality doesn't match these predictions—even when reality is objectively positive—we get a fairness threat response anyway. So even good news can turn into not-as-good news for subjective reasons.
This is why fairness issues can't always be solved by giving people what they want: Sometimes it's the expectations that need adjusting, not the circumstances.
Yet while the above might make you think it'd be better to not see all the fairness threats at work, there's actually a benefit to getting better at noticing them: because fairness threats can be so intense, you might have to manage an unfairness response before the arousal kicks in. Once your limbic system is fully activated by perceived injustice, your capacity for the cognitive reframing that could help you is significantly diminished.
The intensity of fairness responses creates a unique management challenge. Labeling ("I'm experiencing a fairness threat.") may not be strong enough, especially if it isn't caught early in the threat response experience.
Managing fairness threats is easier if you're already skilled at emotional regulation—the labeling and reframing techniques that work for other SCARF elements become your foundation here too.
That means the cognitively-demanding reframing and managing expectations. First reframing:
A quite useful reframing tool here is to view the situation from the other person's perspective. What constraints might they be operating under? What information do they have that you don't? What pressures or priorities might be influencing their decisions? When you can genuinely consider their constraints, pressures, or different priorities, it activates your prefrontal cortex and reduces limbic system activation. The goal isn't to excuse unfair behavior, but to understand it—which often reveals that what felt personal and intentional might be circumstantial.
However, perspective-taking becomes nearly impossible once you've tagged someone as unfair, which leads to one of the most destructive patterns Dr. Rock identifies: "Many arguments between people, especially those close to us, involve incorrect perceptions of unfairness, triggering events that activate an even deeper sense of unfairness in all parties."
Incorrect perceptions of unfairness. I'm certain you've experienced a spiral like this:
- Someone misreads another person's intent (being "mind-blind" for a moment)
- This triggers a fairness threat in the first person
- Their reaction creates a genuine fairness threat for the second person
- Now both parties have legitimate fairness grievances
- Dr. Rock: "The result can be an intense downward spiral, driven by accidental connections and one's expectations then altering perception"
This is why the timing of your management response matters. Once the spiral starts, each person's fairness threat validates the other's, making it exponentially harder to step back and reframe.
This brings us back to that dad wisdom: we live in an unfair world, and adjusting our expectations accordingly is the most powerful fairness management tool we have. When you expect unfairness as part of the human experience rather than an exception to it, you're much less likely to be derailed by it.
When Fairness Becomes Your Fuel
Not all fairness responses need to be managed away. Dr. Rock offers this insight: "If you perceive an injustice that you think should be righted, you could choose to allow yourself to feel a sense of unfairness. Choosing to be driven by these emotions may help you push past fears inherent in taking action to right a wrong."
This is fairness as fuel rather than threat. The righteous anger that comes with genuine injustice can provide the emotional energy needed to advocate for change, challenge unfair systems, or protect others from similar treatment.
There's a prefrontal cortex tradeoff, though: "This comes with the cost of reduced prefrontal cortex activity." So the choice becomes: accept the cognitive cost in service of addressing a larger injustice, or manage the emotional response to preserve your thinking capacity.
Brain-Aware Fairness
Understanding how your brain processes fairness can help you recognize when your threat response is proportionate to actual injustice versus when it's being amplified by tired neural circuits or unrealistic expectations.
You can choose when to lean into fairness-driven action and when to invest your cognitive resources in reframing and moving forward. You can spot the early signs of fairness spirals and intervene before they consume entire teams.
Like experiencing all of the SCARF framework elements as rewards, our performance at work is better when we feel a sense of fairness. You can create the personal conditions where fairness becomes a collaboration enhancer rather than a constant source of threat.
Your brain will continue monitoring for fairness—that's evolutionary reality no one can change. And you can become skilled at recognizing when that monitoring serves your goals and when it doesn't. That's the difference between being controlled by fairness threats and using your brain's fairness monitoring as the powerful tool it was meant to be.
