Poster #128 - The Development of Children’s Inequity Aversion in China

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Fairness plays a critical role in maintaining interpersonal relationship and supporting social cooperation (Mcauliffe, Blake, Steinbeis, & Warneken, 2017). Inequity aversion, the willingness to pay a cost to avoid unfair situation, is an important component of the human sense of fairness. Importantly, there are two forms of inequity aversion: disadvantageous inequity aversion (DI) that one avoids getting less than others, and advantageous inequity aversion (AI) that one refuses to get more than others (Blake et al., 2015). In the current study, Chinese children from 5 to 12 years of age (4 age groups: 5-6 years old, 7-8 years old, 9-10 years old, 11-12 years old; half were girls; 24 pairs of children in each group, n=96 pairs) were tested in the Inequity Game (Blake et al., 2015) using a dyad visit, and two children in each pair were of the same gender and similar age. During the inequity game, the experimenter offered a series of equal (1-1) and unequal (1-4, DI; 4-1, AI) allocations of rewards to the pair of children. One child, the participant, could choose to accept or reject the allocation. If the participant accepted the allocation, both the participant and the peer receive their payoffs. Otherwise, neither of them got rewards. Results (see Figure 1) showed that both DI and AI were found in Chinese children, and DI was present earlier than AI in China, which were in line with the results of Americans and Canadians in previous studies. Interestingly, AI appeared to emerge earlier in China (7-8 years of age) than in Western countries (8-9 years of age) in previous studies (Blake and McAuliffe, 2011; McAuliffe et al., 2013; Blake et al., 2015). What’s more, DI of Chinese children became weaker with age, which means that when children getting older, they were less likely to reject the disadvantageous allocations. This finding was quite different from the results in previous studies (Blake et al., 2015). These findings suggested that in the Confucian culture of China which empathizes interpersonal harmony, Chinese children are more likely to tolerate unfairness toward themselves (thus accepted disadvantageous allocations when older), and response to others’ unfairness (thus rejected advantageous allocations when younger), for the sake of others. This study provided fresh data for developmental researches of human fairness, and supported that cultural factors could shape the development of fairness.

Authors

• Pengchao Li, Zhejiang University
  Presenting Author

• Jie He, Zhejiang University
  Non-Presenting Author