The Development of Costly Third-party Punishment Across Six Societies

• In Event: 2-141 - How do Children Intervene Against Moral Transgressions?: The Development of Third-party Interventions in Childhood

Integrative Statement

Adults punish unfairness both as second-parties—those directly affected by unfairness (Güth et al., 1982)—and, more surprisingly, as third parties—those who witness unfairness between others (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). Although widespread, third-party punishment shows marked cross-cultural variation in adults (Henrich et al., 2006) suggesting that cultural norms play an important role in shaping this response during ontogeny. Here we investigate the developmental source of this variation by studying the emergence of costly third-party punishment of unfairness across six diverse countries.

We adapted the Third-Party Punishment Game, which has been used successfully with children in the USA (McAuliffe et al., 2015). In this game, children learn about an absent divider who had an opportunity to share six candies with an absent recipient. The divider shared either fairly (equal allocation) or unfairly (selfish allocation). The child—the third party—then had an opportunity to enact or punish the divider’s decision. Punishment decisions negatively affected the divider (took away their candies), but not the recipient. Punishment decisions were either costly or free from the child’s perspective. Additionally, across most of our sites, we ran a ‘norms check’ at the end of the task to assess whether any differences in third party punishment could be attributed to differences in children’s understanding of distributive and intervention norms. For this part of the task, we presented children with hypothetical scenarios and asked them what should be done across different situations.

We tested children across a wide age range, divided into four age groups: 6&7, 8&9, 10&11, and 12 & older across six countries (USA, Canada, Uganda, India, Peru and Vanuatu). Our preliminary findings suggest that intriguing variation exists both in terms of when and where third-party punishment of unfairness emerges in children across different societies as well as in children’s sensitivity to the costs of punishment (Fig 5). Our data from Vanuatu suggest there may additionally be interesting variation in third party punishment in rural vs. urban areas. Finally, our initial investigation of the hypothetical scenario data suggest that cross-societal variation in children’s punishment decisions cannot be attributed to differences in their understanding of local distributive and intervention norms.

These data offer a first look at how children across different societies behave when confronted with unfair behavior as uninvolved third-parties, highlighting the role of culture in shaping children’s responses to unfairness.

Authors

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Tara Callaghan, St. Francis Xavier University
  Non-Presenting Author

• John Corbit, Saint Francis Xavier University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Henry Dixon, University of Auckland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yarrow Dunham, Yale
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ann Finkel, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Felix Warneken, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author