Abstract
In face-to-face bargaining tasks human adults almost always agree on an equal split of resources. This is due to mutually recognized fairness and equality norms. Early developmental studies on sharing and equality norms found that egalitarian allocations of resources are not common before children are 5 or 6 years old. However, recent studies have shown that in some face-to face collaborative situations, or when recipients express their desires, children at much younger ages choose equal allocations. We investigated the ability of 3.5 and 5-year-olds to negotiate face-to-face, whether to collaborate to obtain an equal or an unequal distribution of rewards. We hypothesized that the face-to-face interaction and interdependency between partners would facilitate egalitarian outcomes at both ages. In the first experiment we found that 5-year-olds were more egalitarian than 3.5-year-olds, but neither of the age classes shared equally. In the second experiment, in which we increased the magnitude of the inequality, we found that children at both ages mostly agreed on the unequal distribution. These results show that communication and face-to-face interactions are not sufficient to guarantee equal allocations at 3–5 years of age. These results add to previous findings suggesting that in the context of non-collaboratively produced resources it is only after 5 years of age that children use equality norms to allocate resources.
Highlights
Research on the development of fairness found that it is only from 5–6 years onwards that children exhibit inequality aversion
In the first 2 trials, E1 helped the children with the order of events in the game by (1) checking with them both apparatuses and the amount of gummy bears in each apparatus and on each plate; (2) encouraging children to decide together which apparatus they wanted; and (3) after reaching a joint decision and the children pulling on the rope together, telling the children that each child would get the gummy bears of her/his plate, and that they shouldn’t split differently the gummy bears obtained (“Each keeps her own gummy bears”)
When 5-year-olds agreed on the unequal apparatus the distribution of rewards between partners did not differ from chance
Summary
Research on the development of fairness found that it is only from 5–6 years onwards that children exhibit inequality aversion. In some studies children were participants and recipients of the rewards but the partner was still a fictitious one, in order to rule out the possibility that the children’s behaviour might be motivated by the expectation of future favours by the partner [4, 5]. In all these hypothetical scenarios using verbal measures, the youngest children generally behaved selfishly and it was only from around 5 or 6 years of age that they tended to divide resources (equitable allocations emerged even later from 7–8 years onwards). In this phase each child was given a colour-marked but transparent tube (“gummy bear tower”) and told to place their gummy bears into the tube to take with them afterwards
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