Suppose this hypothesis about motivation is correct. How strong and psychologically powerful of a force does it typically seem to be in cases involving fairness? The evidence suggests, at least given the current state of research, that for many of us it is only weak in strength. We can already see this from the studies cited above when so many participants do not actually follow their moral principle about what is a fair task assignment. In addition, Batson varied the previous setup so that the assignment was between a positive and a negative task, where the latter involved receiving “mild but uncomfortable” electric shocks for each incorrect response.  With this change, only 25% of participants offered to let the experimenter flip the coin, and another 25% flipped themselves, with 91% choosing the positive task. The remaining 50% of participants simply bypassed the pretense of the coin flip and gave themselves the positive task while readily admitting that this was not morally right (Batson and Thompson 2001: 56.). The implication is that moral motivation caused by our fairness norms seems to be weak and highly susceptible to being outweighed in cases of this type where the person’s self-interest is at stake.