Third party punishment promotes fairness in children

• In Event: 2-032 - The foundations of social norm psychology

Integrative Statement

Fairness norms are an important stabilizer of human cooperation. Across societies, people conform to local fairness norms and enforce adherence to them in others. Strikingly, people pay to enforce fairness norms even when they are uninvolved third parties, so-called third-party punishment (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). Work with children shows that this form of intervention emerges in mid-childhood: by the age of 6, children in the USA are willing to sacrifice resources to punish unfairness in a third-party context (McAuliffe et al., 2015). A robust literature in adults shows that punishment, and even the threat of punishment, increases fair behavior (Fehr & Gächter, 2002). In parallel, evidence suggests that punishment promotes cooperative decisions in older children in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Lergetporer et al., 2014). Here, we explore whether third-party punishment can similarly promote adherence to fairness norms in children. Understanding the role that third-party punishment plays in influencing children’s fairness behavior is particularly important given that norms of cooperation are acquired in childhood. Thus, punishment during mid-childhood may represent an important means by which children learn to conform with local norms.
Here we report findings from a study that examined whether third-party punishment increases fairness in children. Because the presence of a third party could increase fairness through reputational mechanisms (Engelmann & Rapp, 2018), we included a reputational condition in which the third party watched but did not punish. We tested N= 121 children, divided between two age groups: 6- and 7-year-olds. Children played six trials of a forced-choice Dictator Game in which they chose between two splits of resources between themselves and an absent (but real) partner (Fig 1). Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: (1) Punishment condition, in which a third-party observer punished any unfair decisions; (2) Reputation condition, in which a third-party observer watched their decisions, but did not punish; (3) Baseline condition, in which no observer was present.
Our preliminary results suggest that children were more likely to make fair choices in the punishment condition than in the reputation or baseline conditions. However, this effect was influenced by age: condition had a larger effect on children in the younger age group than children in the older age group (Fig. 2). Additionally, our data indicate that children in the punishment condition were more likely to make fair decisions in later trials than in earlier trials, suggesting that punishment may increasingly promote fairness over time. More broadly, these data suggest that punishment by third-parties promotes fairness, pointing to its potential role as a mechanism for the acquisition of fairness norms.

Authors

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Justin Martin, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sophia Martin, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author