Peter R. Blake

“I had so much it didn’t seem fair”: Eight-year-olds reject two forms of inequity

Research using economic games has demonstrated that adults are willing to sacrifice rewards in order to prevent inequity both when they receive less than a social partner (disadvantageous inequity) and when they receive more (advantageous inequity). We investigated the development of both forms of inequity aversion in 4- to 8-year-olds using a novel economic game in which children could accept or reject unequal allocations of candy with an unfamiliar peer. The results showed that 4- to 7-year-olds rejected disadvantageous offers, but accepted advantageous offers. By contrast, 8-year-olds rejected both forms of inequity. These results suggest that two distinct mechanisms underlie the development of the two forms of inequity aversion.

I Should but I Won’t: Why Young Children Endorse Norms of Fair Sharing but Do Not Follow Them

Young children endorse fairness norms related to sharing, but often act in contradiction to those norms when given a chance to share. This phenomenon has rarely been explored in the context of a single study. Using a novel approach, the research presented here offers clear evidence of this discrepancy and goes on to examine possible explanations for its diminution with age. In Study 1, 3–8-year-old children readily stated that they themselves should share equally, asserted that others should as well, and predicted that others had shared equally with them. Nevertheless, children failed to engage in equal sharing until ages 7–8. In Study 2, 7–8-year-olds correctly predicted that they would share equally, and 3–6-year-olds correctly predicted that they would favor themselves, ruling out a failure-of-willpower explanation for younger childrens behavior. Similarly, a test of inhibitory control in Study 1 also failed to explain the shift with age toward adherence to the endorsed norm. The data suggest that, although 3-year-olds know the norm of equal sharing, the weight that children attach to this norm increases with age when sharing involves a cost to the self.

The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies

A sense of fairness plays a critical role in supporting human cooperation. Adult norms of fair resource sharing vary widely across societies, suggesting that culture shapes the acquisition of fairness behaviour during childhood. Here we examine how fairness behaviour develops in children from seven diverse societies, testing children from 4 to 15 years of age (n = 866 pairs) in a standardized resource decision task. We measured two key aspects of fairness decisions: disadvantageous inequity aversion (peer receives more than self) and advantageous inequity aversion (self receives more than a peer). We show that disadvantageous inequity aversion emerged across all populations by middle childhood. By contrast, advantageous inequity aversion was more variable, emerging in three populations and only later in development. We discuss these findings in relation to questions about the universality and cultural specificity of human fairness.

The developmental origins of fairness: the knowledge–behavior gap

Recent research in developmental psychology shows that children understand several principles of fairness by 3 years of age, much earlier than previously believed. However, childrens knowledge of fairness does not always align with their behavior, and immediate self-interest alone cannot explain this gap. In this forum paper, we consider two factors that influence the relation between fairness knowledge and behavior: relative advantage and how rewards are acquired.

Evolving the ingredients for reciprocity and spite

Darwin never provided a satisfactory account of altruism, but posed the problem beautifully in light of the logic of natural selection. Hamilton and Williams delivered the necessary satisfaction by appealing to kinship, and Trivers showed that kinship was not necessary as long as the originally altruistic act was conditionally reciprocated. From the late 1970s to the present, the kinship theories in particular have been supported by considerable empirical data and elaborated to explore a number of other social interactions such as cooperation, selfishness and punishment, giving us what is now a rich description of the nature of social relationships among organisms. There are, however, two forms of theoretically possible social interactions—reciprocity and spite—that appear absent or nearly so in non-human vertebrates, despite considerable research efforts on a wide diversity of species. We suggest that the rather weak comparative evidence for these interactions is predicted once we consider the requisite socioecological pressures and psychological mechanisms. That is, a consideration of ultimate demands and proximate prerequisites leads to the prediction that reciprocity and spite should be rare in non-human animals, and common in humans. In particular, reciprocity and spite evolved in humans because of adaptive demands on cooperation among unrelated individuals living in large groups, and the integrative capacities of inequity detection, future-oriented decision-making and inhibitory control.

Social influences on inequity aversion in children.

Adults and children are willing to sacrifice personal gain to avoid both disadvantageous and advantageous inequity. These two forms of inequity aversion follow different developmental trajectories, with disadvantageous inequity aversion emerging around 4 years and advantageous inequity aversion emerging around 8 years. Although inequity aversion is assumed to be specific to situations where resources are distributed among individuals, the role of social context has not been tested in children. Here, we investigated the influence of two aspects of social context on inequity aversion in 4- to 9-year-old children: (1) the role of the experimenter distributing rewards and (2) the presence of a peer with whom rewards could be shared. Experiment 1 showed that children rejected inequity at the same rate, regardless of whether the experimenter had control over reward allocations. This indicates that children’s decisions are based upon reward allocations between themselves and a peer and are not attempts to elicit more favorable distributions from the experimenter. Experiment 2 compared rejections of unequal reward allocations in children interacting with or without a peer partner. When faced with a disadvantageous distribution, children frequently rejected a smaller reward when a larger reward was visible, even if no partner would obtain the larger reward. This suggests that nonsocial factors partly explain disadvantageous inequity rejections. However, rejections of disadvantageous distributions were higher when the larger amount would go to a peer, indicating that social context enhances disadvantageous inequity aversion. By contrast, children rejected advantageous distributions almost exclusively in the social context. Therefore, advantageous inequity aversion appears to be genuinely social, highlighting its potential relevance for the development of fairness concerns. By comparing social and nonsocial factors, this study provides a detailed picture of the expression of inequity aversion in human ontogeny and raises questions about the function and evolution of inequity aversion in humans.

Early representations of ownership

To navigate a world filled with private property, children must be able to assign ownership information to objects and update that information when appropriate. In this chapter, the authors propose that children include ownership as an attribute of their object representations. Children can learn about ownership attributes either by witnessing owners acting on their property, a visual source, or by receiving information from the testimony of others, a verbal source. The authors consider the differences between these two forms of information and how they might conflict at the representational level, leading to difficulties in learning about ownership.

The shadow of the future promotes cooperation in a repeated prisoner's dilemma for children

Cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals can be supported by direct reciprocity. Theoretical models and experiments with adults show that the possibility of future interactions with the same partner can promote cooperation via conditionally cooperative strategies such as tit-for-tat (TFT). Here, we introduce a novel implementation of the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) designed for children to examine whether repeated interactions can successfully promote cooperation in 10 and 11 year olds. We find that children cooperate substantially more in repeated PDs than in one-shot PDs. We also find that girls cooperate more than boys, and that children with more conduct problems cooperate less. Finally, we find that children use conditional cooperation strategies but that these strategies vary by gender and conduct problem rating. Specifically, girls and children with few conduct problems appear to follow an altruistic version of win-stay, lose-shift (WSLS), attempting to re-establish cooperation after they had defected. Boys and children with more conduct problems appear to follow a Grim strategy, defecting for the duration after the partner defects. Thus we provide evidence that children utilize the power of direct reciprocity to promote cooperation in strategic interactions and that, by late elementary school, distinct strategies of conditional cooperation have emerged.

The developmental foundations of human fairness

New behavioural and neuroscientific evidence on the development of fairness behaviours demonstrates that the signatures of human fairness can be traced into childhood. Children make sacrifices for fairness (1) when they have less than others, (2) when others have been unfair and (3) when they have more than others. The latter two responses mark a critical departure from what is observed in other species because they enable fairness to be upheld even when doing so goes against self-interest. This new work can be fruitfully combined with insights from cognitive neuroscience to understand the mechanisms of developmental change.

Give as I give: Adult influence on children’s giving in two cultures

Adult influence on childrens altruistic behavior may differ between cultural communities. We used an experimental approach to assess the influence of adult models on childrens altruistic giving in a city in the United States and rural villages in India. Children between 3 and 8 years of age were tested with their parents in the United States (n=163) and India (n=154). Parents modeled either a generous or stingy donation; children then performed a similar task in private. Children in both communities were influenced by the stingy model, but only children in India increased their giving after viewing a generous model. The models influence also increased with age in India. Results of a questionnaire revealed that parents in both communities believed that children learned sharing behavior from them. We consider these results in light of differences between these societies, including different socialization goals, cultural values, and content biases that may affect altruistic giving.