You Cannot Give her More Than me, but I can: Agency Increases Satisfaction With Inequality

• In Event: Beyond Resources: Fairness as Moral Regulation of Social Relationships

Abstract

Children seem to be inequality averse; they get very upset when they receive less than others (LoBue et al., 2011). Yet recent research suggests that if you imbue children with agency, many will opt to receive less and give others more than them (Shaw, Choshen-Hillel, & Caruso, 2016). One possibility is that this demonstrates that agency increases children's satisfaction with receiving less. An alternative possibility is that children are willing to let others have more to avoid appearing envious.
To test these two alternatives we examine children's satisfaction with receiving less than others when this inequality results from someone else' decision (no agency) or their own decision (agency). We predict that children will be more satisfied when they are agentic because having such agency removes the unfairness of receiving less and gives children a warm glow of being generous (Shaw et al., 2016).
In Experiment 1 (221 Israeli children 4- to 10-years-old; M = 80.71 months, SD = 19.76 months; 52% female) we used a within participant design in which the child participant was presented with two (counter-balanced) conditions. In both conditions, the participant and another child were each given 2 stickers. In the no-agency condition, the experimenter was the allocator and could give an extra sticker to the other child or discard it to maintain equality. The experimenter always opted to give it. In the agency condition, the participant was the allocator and had to choose between giving the extra sticker to the other child or discarding it. After the allocation, the participant was asked how satisfied she was with the outcome of the other child (1 = "very sad", 6 = "very happy").
We found that children were more satisfied in the agency condition (M = 5.09, SD = 1.44) than in the no agency condition, M = 3.73, SD = 1.90), F(1,435) = 97.51, p < .001, b = 1.36. Importantly, this was true even among participants who decided to give the extra sticker to the other child (Agency, M = 5.01, SD = 1.55, No agency M = 4.44, SD = 1.78), t(429) = 2.99, p = .003, b = 0.57.
In Experiment 2 (196 Israeli children 4- to 10-years-old ;M = 81.9 months, SD = 20.8 months; 47% female) we replicate this pattern in a similar design with a more stringent test in which the experimenter uses a lottery to assign more to the other child. Again participants who decided to give the extra sticker to the other child were more satisfied in the agency condition (M = 5.46, SD = 0.83) than in the no agency condition (M = 4.68, SD = 1.50), t(381) = 3.75, p < .001, b = 0.77.
Thus, in both experiments we found that the exact same child responded to the exact same unequal allocation quite differently, depending on whether or not they had agency. We discuss the implication of these results for current theories of the development of inequity aversion and fairness.

Authors

• Alex Shaw, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Shoham Choshen-Hillel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tom Gordon-Hecker, Ben Gurion University
  Non-Presenting Author