I’ve been saying that people sue for justice, not money, for so many years with so little affect that you’ll have to forgive me my current obsession with the best example to come down the pike ever. But you don’t have to trust me, or your own over-Winklevossed ears.
The social scientists who study these things say that the way in which we respond to adversity “often reflects the fact that [our] prestige or status has been threatened more than the fact that [our] purchasing power has been diminished.” Miller,Disrespect and the Experience of Injustice, Annual Review of Psychology (2002). In other words, the CEO of Apple, a couple of rich twenty-somethings, and most of the other kids on the block will retaliate when they’ve been disrespected.
The research also shows that IBM is unlikely to recommend suit against Hewlett-Packard if it believes the competition is treating it with respect. Although this is particularly true of fiduciary and special relationships such as lawyer-client and business partnerships of all kinds, it also applies to arm’s length business transactions.
Every commercial interaction, we are told, “represents a social exchange and every form of social behavior represents a resource.” People’s satisfaction with the outcome of a commercial transaction therefore “depends highly, and often primarily, on their perception of the fairness of those outcomes.”
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