Children’s motives for third-party punishment

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

Abstract

Humans punish individuals who violate fairness norms, even if they have to pay a cost and are not directly affected. This so-called third-party punishment (TPP) has been considered as a critical test of concern for cooperative norms because it comes at a cost without immediate benefits to the third party. More recently, developmental psychologists have started to investigate the ontogenetic origins of TPP, finding that it first emerges in US children around age 6 (McAuliffe et al., 2015). This raises questions about the underlying psychological processes that give rise to this behavior. Here we address whether children’s TPP is driven by the fairness-based motive to establish equality or more competitive motives of social comparison. Moreover, we address whether children’s third-party punishment might be an extension of their second-party experience of receiving unfair treatment themselves.

In Study 1, we examined whether N = 60 5- to 9-year-olds use TPP to create exact equality. Prior work has shown that children are more likely to punish when another person is selfish than when the person is fair. However, no study addressed whether children calibrate their degree of punishment to create exact equality. Here, child participants observed how a divider allocated four coins between the self and a recipient. The divider made one of three offers: Fair offers (2 for the self and 2 for the recipient), Mildly unfair offers (3:1) and Extremely unfair offers (4:0). Therefore, unlike in prior studies with punishment as a binary option, children could decide not only whether to punish but also how much to punish. Our results show that with age, children calibrate the amount of punishment to establish exact equality (Figure 1). This suggests that over development, TPP is motivated by a desire to restore equality rather than competition or a desire to avenge the victim.

In Study 2, we investigated the role of children’s own immediate experience for TPP. It is possible that children experiencing unfair treatment heighten their TPP. N = 160 5- to 9-year-olds received either fair (3 out of 6 coins) or unfair allocations (0 out of 6 coins) from another player. In the subsequent test phase, children could punish against unfair allocations as a third-party. We hypothesized that children who received unfair offers would increase TPP compared to those who received fair offers. Results, however, revealed that children showed a comparable TPP even though they received unfair treatment and thus have relatively fewer coins for punishment. Also, with age, children were more likely to punish unfair over fair offers (Figure 2). The findings suggest that TPP is not swayed by immediate experiences of (un)fairness. Rather, over development, children enact TPP systematically to prevent unequal outcomes.

Together, our studies show that children are willing to pay a cost to create exact equality (Study 1) and that age-dependent fairness concerns might be more prevalent than children’s own immediate experience (Study 2). These results imply that children use TPP to move others closer to fairness.

Authors

• Young-eun Lee, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Felix Warneken, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author