The development of trustworthiness and fairness across five diverse cultures

• In Event: Moral development across cultures: from judgment to behavior

Abstract

Moral judgments and behaviors can vary dramatically across cultures (Henrich et al. 2006, 2010; Knack & Keefer 1997), yet we know relatively little about the sources of this variation in development. Do some ecological and cultural variables promote the relatively early onset of these moral behaviors? Does the societal value placed on these behaviors predict their strength in childhood and beyond?

Here, we explored the development of morality in two key domains — trustworthiness and fairness — in children (ages 5-13 years old, N = 413) using incentivized economic games. To better understand how moral cognition varies across socioecological contexts, we worked with communities across five countries, collaborating with families and schools in the United States, Canada, Uganda, Peru, and Ecuador. In Ecuador, more specifically, we worked in collaboration with the Shuar, a forager-horticulturalist society in the Amazon.

To measure fairness, we used a version of the Inequity Game (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011), which allowed participants to accept or reject various allocations between them and another partner. With this method, we were able to measure children’s aversion to advantageous inequity — or cases where they were given more rewards than their partner. To measure trustworthiness, we created a child-friendly version of the Trust Game, in which another player forgoes two resources to allow the participant the chance to gain six resources. The participant must then decide whether to be trustworthy and share some of those resources with the other player.

Looking across societies, we find similar patterns in behavior across both tasks in four out of five societies: children in the United States, Peru, Uganda, and Canada tend to favor self-interest in younger ages, sharing less in the trustworthiness task and accepting more advantageous offers in the fairness task. As children age, however, we begin to see cross-cultural divergence of behaviors, such that children in some, but not all societies, tend to share more in the trustworthiness task and reject more advantageous offers, suggesting an early-emerging but culturally-dependent sensitivity to others’ outcomes (Figure 1). We consistently find the largest differences in behavior between the Shuar in Ecuador and the other four populations, where we observe lower sharing in the trustworthiness task and nearly all acceptances of advantageous inequity in the fairness task.

These findings offer novel insights into the ontogeny and flexibility of moral development across cultures, and suggest a role for socioecological factors — such as market integration and industrialization — in shaping children’s moral development. Further, this work highlights the importance of expanding out beyond Western samples to better capture the full range of behavioral diversity found across human societies.

Authors

• Dorsa Amir, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Richard E Ahl, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hannah Bolotin, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Bogese, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gorana Gonzalez, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author

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

• Lawrence S. Sugiyama, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author