Poster #123 - Do Children Punish Unfairness to Deter Personal Mistreatment?

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

It is well established that adults punish selfishness at a personal cost even when they are an uninvolved third-party (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). Such costly third-party punishment is striking because it cannot be easily explained by self-interested motivations. If people are rational agents, they will not pay any costs to intervene against third-party transgressions. Thus, there is much debate over the reasons of punishment. One theory is that people have an altruistic disposition to punish selfishness to maintain cooperative group norms (Fehr et al., 2002). Whereas, others argue that punishment is to prevent punisher themselves from being mistreated in the future (Delton & Krasnow, 2017).

Developmental studies can provide insights into this debate. Recent research show that costly third-party punishment emerges around 5 to 6 years of age (McAuliffe et al., 2015). It is also known that children start to think about the future from 3 years of age and engage in more sophisticated prospective thinking around 5 (Atance & Meltzoff, 2005). Therefore, it is possible that children’s emerging ability to think about the future enables them to punish selfishness to deter future mistreatment.

The current research tested whether 5- to 9-year-old children use punishment to prevent themselves from being mistreated in the future. Children played a third-party computer game in which they witnessed either fair or selfish allocations made by a divider between the self and another player (Fig.1). Children’s task as a third-party was to either accept (no punishment) or reject (punishment) the divider’s allocations by pressing one of the two buttons.

Critically, before playing third-party games, children were informed of a two-party game in which a divider allocates coins between the self and the child. They were assigned to one of two between-subject conditions. In the same-divider condition, children were told that, in the two-party game following the third-party game, the same divider will decide to share coins with them. In contrast, in the different-divider condition, children were informed that a new divider will share coins with them. Our hypothesis is that, if children use punishment as a way to prevent potential mistreatment, they will punish unfair offers more often in the same-divider than in the different-divider condition. Alternatively, if children fear retaliation from dividers, they will punish unfair offers less often in the same-divider than in the different-divider condition.

Pilot results (N=72) revealed that there was a main effect of fairness (b=1.09, p<.01) (Fig.2). However, there was neither main effect of condition nor interactions involving condition or age, suggesting that children punished unfair offers more than fair offers regardless of condition. Preliminary analyses of ongoing data collection (N=39; 32.5% complete) showed a similar pattern that children are sensitive to fairness of allocations (b=1.83, p<.001), but not to the divider they will be interacting in the future.

The current study will address whether punishment in children is motivated by a self-interest to deter unfair treatment in the future. This research has implications for underlying mechanisms of punishment in childhood.

Authors

• Young-eun Lee, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Felix Warneken, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author