Every day, our national news is rife with stories about how our partisan divide is tearing our political discourse apart—and our local news isn’t always that much better. But what if the most fundamental cause of all this in-fighting has more to do with our psychological wiring than with which parties we belong to and which newspapers we read?



That’s the assertion behind a recent article from the Atlantic by Dan Meegan, “Conservatives Have a Different Definition of Fair.” And the many ways that North Americans define “fairness”—whether they realize their definition is different than their neighbors’ or not—has a profound impact on the financial prosperity of our towns.

Meegan defines the two dominant understandings of fairness this way: