I Don’t Want it, but I do Want Half: Inequity Aversion Related to Worthless Objects

• In Event: Created (Un)Equal?: Impact of Resource Type and Value on Children's Fairness Concerns

Abstract

Though specific norms vary by culture, humans are nearly universally concerned with fairness. Outside of third-party judgment paradigms, research on the ontogeny of fairness has focused on how children distribute, or respond to distributions of, desirable resources such as candy or stickers. The results of these studies have produced a remarkably consistent trend; as early as four-years-old, children will pay a cost to avoid inequality that puts them at a disadvantage relative to their peer (Blake et al., 2015; Blake & McAuliffe 2011).

Yet, the psychological mechanism underlying children’s rejection of unequal allocations remains an open question. Are children attempting to prevent a potential competitor from receiving a material advantage? Or, are they objecting to the social implication of being offered less than their compatriot - in which case, the allocated goods are better thought of as a useful signal for interpersonal attitudes? Here, we attempt to disentangle these accounts by observing how four- to seven-year-old children behave in an ultimatum game paradigm when the resources are worthless to them (n = 64; mean age = 5.94; range = 4.10 - 7.96). Specifically, we test the hypothesis that four-year-old children in the U.S. will continue to reject unequal allocations of objects that are valueless to them, due to the lack of respect that this allocation conveys (Engelmann & Tomasello, 2019).

Children are first introduced to a Likert scale, and asked to rate four objects. Among these objects is the target object used in later allocations: a crumpled ball of paper. Children then play a warm-up game with a puppet, wherein the puppet makes a series of errors. This activity is intended to induce fairness concerns through collaboration, and to introduce the puppet as fallible (Corbit et al., 2017). Afterwards, the child plays an ultimatum game in which the puppet makes either equal (1-1) or unequal (1-4) offers of crumpled paper (manipulated within-subject; order counterbalanced across participants). After each distribution, children use a token to non-verbally indicate if they want to accept the allocation or reject it. Finally, children repeat the object evaluation once more, to see if the ultimatum game has influenced the value they assign to each object.

If children are motivated to reject inequality of resources to prevent competitive advantage, they would no longer care with an allocation of worthless objects. Contrary to this,
we found that children’s propensity to reject allocations was overwhelmingly predicted by the relative equality of the offer. Additionally, though descriptive results indicate that children reject inequality more often with age (Figure 1), participant age did not impact model fit. Data from both object evaluations confirmed that children rate the paper balls poorly (mean = -0.98), and that this did not change after the ultimatum game (V = 146, p-value = 0.114). Altogether, this study provides initial evidence that early rejections of inequity are driven by the interpersonal attitudes implied by the resources, rather than the resources themselves.

Authors

• Colin Jacobs, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Sebastian Grueneisen, Max Planck Institute for Human Development

• Harriet Over, University of York

• Jan Engelmann, University of California - Berkeley