London, Oct 21 (IANS): Inequality can be fair too and the brain knows it, a new research has found.

People appreciate fairness in much the same way as they appreciate money for themselves and by that logic fairness does not necessarily imply that everybody gets the same income, the findings showed.

"People accept inequality in situations where people have made different contributions to the money being distributed," said co-author professor Alexander Cappelen from the Norwegian School of Economics.

The researchers looked at the striatum or the reward centre of the brain.

"The brain appreciates both reward and fairness. Both influence the activation of the striatum," Cappelen added.

"Our research showed that the striatum shows more activity to monetary rewards when the reward was judged to be fair," said brain researcher Kenneth Hugdahl from the University of Bergen in Norway.

"This may explain why a lot of people are willing to sacrifice monetary rewards when this results in a fairer balance," Cappelen said.

The researchers put a test group through a set of trials.

Their key discovery was that the activation in the striatum in response to receiving more money to themselves depended on how much they have worked.

The change in the activation was larger for those who had worked a long time, than it was for those who had worked for a short time.

"The results of our research show that people are neither complete saints who only care about fairness, nor complete egoists who only care about money to themselves," Cappelen concluded.

The study appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.