Poster #191 - Fairness Façade: Will Children Strategically use a “Veil of Fairness?”

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Reputational concerns are a driving force behind when people choose to behave fairly. When decisions are transparent between parties, adults often divide resources as fairly as possible (e.g. Hoffman, McCabe, Shachat, Smith, 1994). However, if given the opportunity to maximize their rewards, adults will balance reputational concerns and self-serving motives by paying a small cost to prevent their partner from learning about their unfair behavior (Dana, Cains, & Dawes, 2006), or strategically pretending to be fair (Güth, Huck, & Ockenfels, 1996) to hide their selfishness.

Similar to adults, children have a desire to appear generous to others (Leimgruber, Shaw, Santos, & Olson, 2012) and are more generous and fair if their partner has the potential to punish selfishness (Bereby-Meyer & Fiks, 2012). However, it remains unknown whether, like adults, children will strategically pretend to be fair by manipulating others’ imperfect knowledge and hiding behind a “veil of fairness” (Shaw et al., 2014) to benefit themselves.

In the present study (see Figure 1), we used an adapted version of the Ultimatum Game (Güth et al., 1996) to test whether children, ages 6- to 9-years, would strategically exploit their partners’ imperfect knowledge to conceal selfishness behind a façade of fairness. Children participated in pairs and were assigned to the role of either proposer or responder. The proposer made repeated offers from either a small endowment (two tokens) or a large endowment (ten tokens). Their partner, the responder, could either accept or reject their offer. If the responder accepted the offer, both participants kept the proposed split of tokens. If the responder rejected, neither participant received tokens. Pairs were assigned to either the Informed condition (responders knew the proposer’s initial endowment) or the Ignorant condition (responders did not know the proposer’s initial endowment).

Our main prediction was that proposers would make more fair offers in the Informed condition because responders were aware of the endowments. In the Ignorant condition, proposers would exploit the responders’ ignorance by making offers that could be perceived as fair or generous, when in actuality, the offers were highly unfair and selfish (e.g., offering one token out of ten, hoping the responder would think the offer was one token out of two).

Results (N = 80 pairs, M= 94.84 months) revealed that proposers exploited their partners’ ignorance and manipulated fairness and generosity norms (i.e. giving seemingly half or all) for self-serving motivations. In the Ignorant condition, where the initial endowment was ten tokens, proposers were more likely to exploit the responders’ imperfect knowledge and propose more offers of one and two tokens than in the Informed condition (see Figure 2). In line with adult and developmental work, these findings show that as children begin to manage their reputation and acquire flexible knowledge of fairness, they strategically manipulate the impression of fairness for self-serving motivations.

Authors

• Gorana Gonzalez, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Richard E Ahl, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sara Cordes, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author