When Getting Something Good is Bad: Even Three‐year‐olds React to Inequality

Abstract

Fairness is central to morality. Previous research has shown that children begin to understand fairness between the ages of four and six, depending on the context and method used. Within distributive contexts, there is little clear evidence that children have a concept of fairness before the age of five. This research, however, has mostly examined children's explicit verbal responses to questions about unequal distributions-a method that often underestimates children's knowledge. In the current study, we instead examined emotional and behavioral signs that children notice and dislike inequality. We distributed an unequal number of rewards (stickers) among pairs of children (the ages of three to five years) and probed their responses to the inequality.Both implicit and explicit measures revealed that children as young as three years old notice and react negatively to an unfair distribution, particularly when they receive less than their partner. The few age trends that were found involved verbal (explicit) responses, providing evidence that although children do not explicitly talk about fairness until the age of five or six, this talk is an effort to explain emotional reactions that emerged earlier in development.

Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality

“…Thus, around 3 years of age, children's sharing of toys with a peer increases if that peer had previously shared toys with them, suggesting a sensitivity to direct reciprocity by this age (Levitt et al 1985). Moreover, 3-year-olds display negative emotional responses to distributions in which they receive less, and indeed, even occasionally when they receive more than another child (LoBue et al 2011). By about 4 years of age, children share (even at a cost to themselves) with their friends more than with nonfriends or strangers (Birch & Billman 1986, Moore 2009), and by 8 years of age, children share more with their in-group than their outgroup members (Fehr et al 2008).…”

Young children, but not chimpanzees, are averse to disadvantageous and advantageous inequities

“…With regard to distributions that disadvantage them, young children show negative responses from as young as 3 years (Birch & Billman, 1986;LoBue, Nishida, Chiong, DeLoache, & Haidt, 2011). By 4 or 5 years of age, children will even sacrifice own rewards or accept an absolutely lesser offer to avoid being at a disadvantage relative to a peer (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011;Sheskin, Bloom, & Wynn, 2014).…”

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

“…Sharing has been more difficult to study using first-party tasks because infants and toddlers rarely rectify unequal distributions in their favor: If they happen to receive more resources (e.g., toys or crackers) than an unlucky partner, they make no effort to equate the shares or reduce the disparity between them (e.g., Hamann, Warneken, Greenberg, & Tomasello, 2011;LoBue, Nishida, Chiong, DeLoache, & Haidt, 2011). Nevertheless, young children do share their resources under some conditions: for example, if their mother instructs them to do so, or if their partner explicitly requests resources (e.g., Dunfield, Kuhlmeier, O'Connell, & Kelley, 2011;Hay, Caplan, Castle, & Stimson, 1991;Levitt, Weber, Clark, & McDonnell, 1985).…”