Abstract
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.
Highlights
The occurrence of extensive cooperation in human societies creates numerous opportunities for exploitation by free riders [1,2,3]
Our Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) procedure was as follows: (1) we examined a null model, which included participant ID as the only explanatory variable to test how much variation in the response term could be accounted for by individual variation; (2) we created a full model, which included predictor variables and all two-way interactions between Distribution and the other predictor variables; (3) the full model was compared to the null model using a likelihood ratio test (LRT) to test whether the inclusion of predictors provided a better fit to the data than participant ID alone
Our findings importantly extend previous work by showing that rejections of advantageous allocations are a response to an unequal resource distribution between two peers and are not an attempt to influence the experimenter
Summary
The occurrence of extensive cooperation in human societies creates numerous opportunities for exploitation by free riders [1,2,3]. In order to avoid being exploited, individuals must regulate their contributions to cooperative endeavors by attending to their payoffs relative to those of social partners In line with this reasoning, human adults show a strong aversion to inequitable payoff distributions, i.e. they sacrifice personal gain in order to avoid inequity [4]. In the ultimatum game, people often reject allocations of resources that place them at a disadvantage relative to a partner (i.e. disadvantageous inequity), preferring nothing to a small relative reward [5]. This behavior violates rational choice models that predict that people should accept any non-zero offer of a desirable resource [6]. An aversion to unequal resource distributions has been established in a wide variety of cultural communities [9,10,11], demonstrating the apparent ubiquity of inequity aversion across human populations
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