Fairness, the notion that people deserve or have rights to certain resources or kinds of treatment, is a fundamental dimension of moral cognition. Drawing on recent evidence from economics, psychology, and neuroscience, we ask whether self-interest is always intuitive, requiring self-control to override with reasoning-based fairness concerns, or whether fairness itself can be intuitive. While we find strong support for rejecting the notion that self-interest is always intuitive, the literature has reached conflicting conclusions about the neurocognitive systems underpinning fairness. We propose that this disagreement can largely be resolved in light of an extended Social Heuristics Hypothesis. Divergent findings may be attributed to the interpretation of behavioral effects of ego depletion or neurostimulation, reverse inference from brain activity to the underlying psychological process, and insensitivity to social context and inter-individual differences. To better dissect the neurobiological basis of fairness, we outline how future research should embrace cross-disciplinary methods that combine psychological manipulations with neuroimaging, and that can probe inter-individual, and cultural heterogeneities.

公平是人们应得或有权使用某些资源或各种待遇的概念，是道德认知的基本方面。借助经济学，心理学和神经科学方面的最新证据，我们询问自我利益是否始终是直觉的，需要自我控制才能克服基于推理的公平问题，还是公平本身就可以是直观的。尽管我们坚决支持拒绝承认自我利益永远是直觉的观点，但文献对基于公平的神经认知系统却得出了相互矛盾的结论。我们建议可以根据扩展的社会启发式假设来解决这一分歧。不同的发现可能归因于自我耗竭或神经刺激对行为影响的解释，从大脑活动到潜在的心理过程的反向推理，以及对社交环境和个体差异的不敏感。为了更好地剖析公平性的神经生物学基础，我们概述了未来的研究应如何采用跨学科的方法，这些方法将心理操作与神经成像相结合，并且可以探究个体之间以及文化上的异质性。