Editorial: The Neural Systems of Fairness, Retaliation, and Aggression

“Not fair!” is a call to action regularly heard by parents and mental health professionals. It is well known that a person’s perception of fairness might provoke them to anger and aggression.1 Beyond common experience, all sorts of experiments involving people’s responses to rigged, interactive games have proved the point. Indeed, it is not just people; de Waal2 charmed the world with a TED talk in which monkeys took umbrage and aggressed in response to unfairness. Knowing this, Mathur et al.3 used unfairness and retaliation to illuminate the complex neural circuity of aggression in adolescents.