Emerging Signs of Strong Reciprocity in Human Ontogeny

Abstract

Strong reciprocity is considered here as the propensity to sacrifice resources to be kind or to punish in response to prior acts, a behavior not simply reducible to self-interest and a likely force behind human cooperation and sociality. The aim was to capture emerging signs of strong reciprocity in human ontogeny and across highly contrasted cultures. Three- and 5-year-old middle class American children (N = 162) were tested in a simple, multiple round, three-way sharing game involving the child, a generous puppet, and a stingy puppet. At the end of the game, the child was offered an opportunity to sacrifice some of her personal gains to punish one of the puppets. By 3 years, American children demonstrate a willingness to engage in costly punishment. However, only 5-year-olds show some evidence of strong reciprocity by orienting their punishment systematically toward the stingy puppet. Further analyses and three additional control conditions demonstrate that such propensity is not simply reducible to (a) straight imitation, or (b) inequity aversion. To assess the relative universality of such development, a group of 5- to 6-year-old children from rural Samoa (N = 14) were tested and compared to age and gender-matched American children. Samoan children did not manifest the same propensity toward strong reciprocity. The results are interpreted as pointing to (1) the developmental emergence of an ethical stance between 3 and 5 years of age, and (2) that the expression of such stance by young children could depend on culture.

Variations in judgments of intentional action and moral evaluation across eight cultures

“…Our findings may also call to question the assumption that transculturally, punitive measures carry higher instrumental value than reward (Henrich et al, 2006). That some cultures differentially emphasize praise over punishment may be consistent with an emerging literature demonstrating cultural variation in the tendency to engage in punitive versus restorative justice following violation of a fairness norm (Robbins & Rochat, 2011). Understanding the relationship between moral evaluation and judgment of intentional action may have wide-reaching implications for how we understand and reform our criminal justice systems.…”

Preschoolers value those who sanction non-cooperators

“…Although no crosscultural work exists on this topic yet, we do know that there is cross-cultural variation in both adults' and children's punishment of first-order transgressors that depends on the norms and institutions of the groups (e.g., Henrich et al, 2006;Robbins & Rochat, 2011). It seems plausible that this variation carries over into adults' and children's responses to second-order cooperators and noncooperators as well -though one may predict that because every human group needs to sustain cooperation, every group should show some degree or form of valuing second-order cooperators.…”

Fairness and Distributive Justice by 3- to 5-Year-Old Tibetan Children

“…In future studies, tasks directly taping into fairness sensitivity such as restorative justice should be used. For example, recent cross-cultural works on restorative justice by preschool age children point to marked cultural differences regarding how children from five years tend to punish others who violated fairness norms (e.g., self-hoarding), even if such punishment comes at a personal cost (Robbins & Rochat, 2011). From five years of age, and particularly by middle childhood (House, Silk, Henrich, et al, 2013), adult norms might thus become an important factor in how fairness should 16 be maintained and restored within a particular population context.…”