Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants

Abstract

Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences – such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism – as likely candidates for fostering large-scale cooperation. A critical question concerns the ontogenetic origins of these constituents of cooperative behavior, as well as whether they emerge independently or in an interrelated fashion. The answer to this question will shed light on the interdisciplinary debate regarding the significance of such preferences for explaining how humans become such cooperative beings. We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis – most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms – of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation. Future work of this kind will help determine to what extent uniquely human sociality and morality depend on other-regarding preferences emerging early in life.

Precursors to morality in development as a complex interplay between neural, socioenvironmental, and behavioral facets

“…In this game, children were given two toys to play with (11). One toy was a very desirable ring, which makes sounds while shaking it and has colorful paintings on the other side.…”

“…There is some evidence that an improvement in one prosocial ability may relate to increased abilities in other prosocial areas. For example, 15-mo-old infants who chose to share a toy they preferred (compared with a nonpreferred toy or no toy at all) with an experimenter also attended significantly longer to a third-party interaction in which the allocation of resources among conspecifics was unequal (11). However, another body of literature suggests that early prosocial abilities are not necessarily related (12).…”

Age-Related Changes in Children's Resource Giving: How Social Categories and Fairness Considerations Influence Distribution Decisions

“…These findings suggested that children were more strongly guided by the recipient"s gender and race category, rather than a desire to be fair. However, resource distribution has been suggested as an important developing ground for children"s sense of fairness (Fehr, Bernhard, & Rockenbach, 2008) and as such, these findings contrast with literature which suggest a sense of fairness and equality forms from early infancy (Geraci & Surian, 2011;Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011;Sloane, Baillargeon, & Premack, 2012), leading children to favour equal resource distribution (e.g., Cooley & Killen, 2015). According to Fehr and colleagues (2008), most 7-to 8-year-old children are adverse to either advantageous or disadvantageous resource distribution.…”

Group norms, intergroup resource allocation, and social reasoning among children and adolescents.

“…Thus, a group norm of cooperation is often salient during resource allocation reflecting the generic societal moral norm (Hamann et al, 2011;Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011). Yet peer ingroup and outgroup social norms are not always cooperative and peer groups do sometimes advocate for competition within competitive intergroup resource allocation scenarios, from seven years onwards (Dejesus, Rhodes, & Kinzler, 2014;Shaw, DeScioli, & Olson, 2012).…”