The ontogeny of children’s social emotions in response to (un)fairness

• In Event: The development of fairness: Perceptions, emotions, and actions

Abstract

The human sense of fairness develops during early ontogeny, yet its emotional roots remain poorly understood. Here, we ask if and when children show a negative social emotion, similar to shame or guilt, in response to advantageous unfairness expressed through their body posture. To this end, we are presenting young children across the age range of 4 to 9 years with a scenario in which one child (the actor) selects one of two opaque boxes each containing rewards. In a nonsocial context the reward distribution affects only the actor, while in a social context the reward distribution affects the acting child and a peer recipient. We manipulate whether the choice of the actor results in an equal (1,1) or an unequal (4,1; advantageous) distribution, and measure children’s emotional expression using a Microsoft Kinect depth sensor imaging camera. The crucial question we ask is if and when children show a lowered body posture (indicative of shame or guilt) in response to advantageous unfairness. In addition, we are assessing children’s rejection of advantageously unequal resource distributions (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011), and self-attributed emotions (i.e., children are asked whether they felt “good”, “a little good”, “a little bad” or “bad” in response to the equal and unequal resource allocations).

Preliminary analyses (N = 50) on children’s self-attributed emotions indicated that the addition of the three-way interaction of condition, age and distribution improved model fit, full-reduced model comparison, F(1, 91) = 6.426, p = .013. In the nonsocial context, there was a main effect of distribution, t(54) = 2.255, p = .028, such that children reported more positive emotions to the unequal than the equal distribution. On the other hand, in the social context, there was an interaction of age and distribution, t(37) = -2.712, p = .01, such that children, with age, reported more negative emotions to gaining an advantage over a peer than to equal distributions of resources (see Fig. 1). Children did not reject advantageous inequity more in the social compared to the nonsocial context with age, z = 0.632, p = .527. Yet, this result may be due to the small number of children we have tested so far. Only one third of the children were sampled from the older age group of 7- to 9-year-olds, for which we predicted more rejections in the social context. These results suggest that there are similarities and differences between the development of children’s emotions in response to advantageous inequity and behaviors (i.e., rejections) to reduce unfairness towards others. Data collection and the analyses on children’s body posture are currently ongoing (link to preregistration: https://osf.io/xem8k/). Data collection was interrupted by the pandemic; pending the course of the pandemic, we anticipate that data collection and analyses will be completed by the time of the conference.

Authors

• Stella Claire Gerdemann, Leipzig University
  Presenting Author

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Peter R. Blake, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel Haun, Max Planck Institute
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert Hepach, University of Oxford
  Non-Presenting Author