Beyond our Tribe: Developing a Normative Sense of Group-Transcendent Fairness

• In Event: Beyond Resources: Fairness as Moral Regulation of Social Relationships

Abstract

Fairness is one of our most fundamental moral concerns, present even from infancy. But what are the boundaries of our sense of fairness? Throughout history, cooperating with ingroups has played an important role in enhancing social cohesion, and social preferences in favor of ingroup members are ubiquitous. Does this mean that we apply the fairness principle only within group boundaries? Across four preregistered studies, our paper systematically examines the emergence and development of the normative sense of "group-transcendent fairness", i.e. commitment to the ideal of treating ingroups and outgroups equally.
To investigate this question, we presented children and adults with situations in which helping an outgroup member would incur a cost to the ingroup member, but where equal helping was also possible. In Study 1, to get a general understanding of the developmental endpoint, we asked US adults (N=580) to allocate limited but divisible resources (i.e., drinking liquids) between ingroup and outgroup members. We found that adults would like to (behavioral decision) and thought it was morally right to (prescriptive judgment) allocate equally instead of giving more to their family, political, or minimal ingroup members, both when resources were abundant and when they were scarce, despite predicting that most people would in fact behave less fairly (descriptive judgment), Figure 1.
In Study 2, 4-6-year-olds and 9-11-year-olds (N=60) responded to child-friendly versions of the same allocation situations, and we found that older children endorsed intergroup fairness as morally right, whereas younger children tended to endorse ingroup favoritism, both when the ingroup is meaningless (i.e., minimal ingroup, Study 2a) and highly meaningful (family ingroup, Study 2b), Figure 1. In Study 3, 4-9-year-olds (N=90, 15 per age group) responded to real-life situations involving giving gifts between family or minimal ingroup members and outgroup members. Replicating previous results, we found that by age 8 or 9 the modal response was the endorsement of intergroup fairness norms. Interestingly, children did not predict most other children would be fair, nor did they allocate equally in actual anonymous behavior, suggesting the sense of group-transcendent fairness is prescriptive rather than descriptive. Finally, we found that even in China, where ingroup loyalty is more emphasized, people also strongly endorse group-transcendent fairness although their behavioral decisions favor family members (Figure 2), suggesting both the robustness of the normative judgment across cultures and potential cultural influence in decisions (Study 4).
In conclusion, across four studies, we found that by middle childhood, we develop a sense of fairness that transcends group boundaries, which persists into adulthood and is endorsed strongly in both US and China. This group-transcendent sense of fairness is prescriptive in nature, robust across different group and stake contexts, and manifests differently in people's decisions in different cultures. Therefore, despite our natural tendencies towards ingroup favoritism we nevertheless develop a clear normative sense of fairness that transcends the boundaries of our own tribe, a moral achievement that may help promote continual societal and cultural progress.

Authors

• Fan Yang, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Xin Yang, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author