Collaboration Increases Third Party Punishment of Inequity in Young Children

• In Event: 3-210 - Game Theory in the Playground: The Development of Cooperative Problem-Solving in Children

Integrative Statement

One of the ways cooperation is maintained in human societies is through punishment of unfair behaviors (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). Adults are willing to punish individuals who distribute resources unfairly, even when the punisher is not personally affected (Raihani et al., 2012). Third party punishment (TPP) of unequal sharing shows a willingness to intervene to enforce equity norms in the absence of personal exposure to unfairness. Thus, TPP signals a concern for fairness that extends beyond personal or interpersonal interests toward a normative sense of fairness.
Previous work has found that prior collaboration fosters an earlier onset of equal sharing in children (Hamann et al., 2011; Warneken et al., 2011). Recent work has found that collaboration fosters a strong concern for equity (Corbit et al., 2017). Whether early emerging egalitarian sharing is applied only within collaborative interactions or results from a more general, normative concern for fairness is unknown. TPP of unfair sharing demonstrates a willingness to intervene against normative violations, thus children’s willingness to punish inequity in a collaborative context provides a strong test case for the normative impact of collaboration.
Participants (n=104) between the ages of 3-7 years were assigned to one of two conditions in which they watched puppets share earned resources obtained through Collaboration or Parallel (individual) Work. After earning resources, by chance a “lucky” puppet gained control over all resources and was subsequently asked to share with a second puppet. Each child saw two blocks of 4 trials where the puppet shared either equally (2 each) or unequally (3 for self, 1 for other). Afterwards, children could accept or punish (discard all resources) the distributions. Children’s spontaneous protest provided an additional behavioral measure of children’s sanctions against normative violations. Finally, a measure of normative justification for children’s punishment decisions was included to assess participant’s knowledge of normative behavior across the two work type conditions.
Overall, participants were more likely to punish unfair sharing when resources were earned through collaboration compared to individual work (LRT: Estimate = -1.052, SE = 0.408, χ² = 7.021, df = 1, p = 0.008) (Figure 1). Furthermore, across both work type conditions the older the participants were, the more likely they were to reject unequal trials relative to equal trials (LRT: Estimate = 1.138, SE = 0.473, χ² = 5.878, df = 1, p = 0.015). In contrast to the punishment measure, children made reference to equity and fairness in their normative justifications at a similar rate across the work type conditions. This pattern suggests that while children conceive of equity as fair regardless of how the resources were earned, they showed a greater motivation to intervene by punishing inequity when it occurred between collaborators. These findings contribute to a growing body of evidence in support of the hypothesis that collaboration is a special context for the development of fairness.

Author

• John Corbit, Saint Francis Xavier University
  Presenting Author