Poster #124 - Implicit Fairness Preferences in Children and Adults

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Fairness is a central concern of societies and individuals. Young children reject unfairness in simplified economic experiments: when given the option to accept or reject different distributions of candies, children will reject distributions that disadvantage them, e.g. when they receive fewer candies than a peer. In contrast, when the distribution benefits them, e.g. when they receive more candies than a peer, only older children reject this advantageous inequity. However, it is unknown what drives this change in behavior across development. One possibility is that children develop a deeply internalized preference for equality. An alternative possibility is older children prefer a relative advantage as much as younger children, but increasingly override this preference to adhere to fairness norms. The choices participants make in experimental economics experiments cannot distinguish between these two possibilities.
We present an initial set of studies that investigates whether adults and children have internalized preferences for equality using an Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald et al., 2003). The IAT is an established measure of implicit preferences that has been adapted for children as young as four years of age. In a typical IAT, participants simultaneously sort instances of two attributes (usually positive versus negative) and two categories (here, equal versus unequal). We develop a Fairness IAT to test preferences for equality over each kind of inequality (advantageous and disadvantageous) to determine whether people truly prefer equal outcomes, and whether this preference differs depending on whether the individual personally benefits or is disadvantaged. In the Fairness IAT, participants sorted images of equal and unequal distributions of tokens (Studies 1-3) or candies (Study 4) and positive and negative words. In the Advantageous condition, participants received more than another person; in the Disadvantageous condition, participants received less than another person.
Across four studies, we show adults and children have implicit preferences for equality. In Study 1 (N = 96), adults have a stronger preference for equality in the Disadvantageous condition than the Advantageous condition, t = 4.07, p < 0.001. In Study 2 (N = 64), we replicate this finding with children 9 to 10 years old, t = 3.01, p < 0.01. In Study 3 (N = 96 adults) and Study 4 (N = 64 children 7-13 years old), we find adults and children again have a stronger preference for equality in the Disadvantageous condition than the Advantageous condition, even when they receive the same absolute amount in both cases (Study 3 t = 3.38, p < 0.01; Study 4 t = 4.29, p < 0.001).
However, there is surprisingly little variation in these preferences between 7 years of age and adulthood. This suggests that across development, people have an internalized aversion to unfairness when it is harmful to themselves, but not in cases of self-benefitting injustice. This suggests even when older children and adults reject advantageous inequality, they do so reluctantly, not because they have developed preferences for equality.

Authors

• Monica Patricia Burns, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Felix Warneken, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author