AS THE bankster phenomenon has so eloquently illustrated, Homo sapiens is exquisitely sensitive to injustice. Many people grudgingly tolerated the astronomical incomes of financial traders, and even the cosmological ones of banks' chief executives, when they thought those salaries were earned by honest labour. Now, so many examples to the contrary have emerged that toleration has vanished.

强盗银行家的现象已经有力地证明，人类对于不公平是敏感至极的。过去，许多人对于操盘手高到天上去的收入，甚至是银行高管天文数字一般的薪酬，虽愠愠不平，但尚能忍耐，他们曾以为这些收入是靠诚实劳动赚来的。但如今，随着大量反例的出现，公众的忍耐已经不复存在。

Surprisingly, however, the psychological underpinnings of a sense of injustice-in particular, what triggers willingness to punish an offender, even at a cost to the punisher-have not been well established. But a recent experiment by Nichola Raihani of University College, London, and Katherine McAuliffe of Harvard, just published in Biology Letters, attempts to disentangle the matter.

然而让人惊讶的是，心理学上对于不公平感的成因尚未能做出很好的解释，尤其是为何人们不惜付出代价也要惩罚侵犯者。但是，英国伦敦大学学院的尼古拉·雷汉尼（Nichola Raihani）和哈佛大学的凯瑟琳·麦考利夫（Katherine McAuliffe）最近进行的一项实验尝试对这个问题抽丝剥缕，这一实验的结果发表在了最近的《生物学快报》上。