The Inequity Game: What we know ten years later

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

Abstract

Adults in the USA sacrifice personal gain to avoid unequal resource distributions, showing so-called inequity aversion. Critically, they reject unequal allocations in both directions: when they are disadvantaged by unequal distributions (disadvantageous inequity aversion) as well as when they are advantaged by unequal distributions (advantageous inequity aversion).

Over the last decade, a wealth of evidence has emerged showcasing that these responses are not unique to adults but rather take root early in development. One method that has been particularly useful in studies of inequity aversion has been the Inequity Game (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011). In this task, children are paired with an unfamiliar peer and accept or reject different allocations of sweets (Fig. 1). Rejections come at personal cost but these costs depend on the type of inequity aversion being examined: in the disadvantageous condition, children must sacrifice one sweet to prevent their partner from receiving four while in the advantageous condition, children must sacrifice four sweets to prevent their partner from receiving one. In the first Inequity Game study, published ten years ago, Blake & McAuliffe showed that the two forms of inequity aversion—disadvantageous and advantageous inequity aversion—follow distinct developmental trajectories, with the former appearing in both younger and older children and the latter appearing only in older children. This was exciting because it suggested that these two forms of inequity aversion were not simply two sides of the same coin but rather different responses that were potentially reliant on different underlying mechanisms.

Since the publication of the initial Inequity Game paper, a number of follow-up studies have built upon the original findings, showing that the asymmetry between disadvantageous inequity aversion (DIA) and advantageous inequity aversion (AIA) asymmetry emerges across a variety of contexts including across different societies (DIA: lower variability; AIA: higher variability; Blake et al., 2015); social contexts (DIA: non-social and social; AIA: social only; McAuliffe et al., 2013) and collaborative contexts (DIA: unaffected by collaboration; AIA: increases after collaboration; Corbit et al., 2017). However, this asymmetry does not appear in all contexts (Tsoi et al., 2019; Gonzalez et al., 2020). In this presentation, I review what we have learned from these and other Inequity aversion studies over the last decade. Additionally, I present new analyses that combine data from studies from across the last decade (N = 969; Fig. 2), showcasing major patterns in the development of inequity aversion in children in the USA and providing a meta-analytic review of existing work. In these new analyses, I also examine the distribution of inequity rejector ‘types’ to assess the degree of individual variation in children’s responses to advantageous and disadvantageous inequity.

Based on a structured review of past work with the Inequity Game and the new analyses that combine data from across the decade, I argue that we now have a firm understanding of how responses to advantageous and disadvantageous inequity develop in children in the USA and a growing understanding of why they are different.

Authors

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College
  Presenting Author

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