How Fairness and Dominance Guide Young Children’s Decisions in a Bargaining Game

• In Event: Children’s Early Understanding of Group Coordination in Social and Epistemic Conflicts.

Abstract

Human group life is heavily structured by cooperation but also frequently involves conflict: we compete with others for resources, have opposing views on how joint activities should be performed, or how goods are divided. In many of these situations, individuals prefer to reach an agreement over not reaching an agreement, but each prefers an agreement that favors their interests. These are so-called bargaining problems. A central developmental challenge for children is to learn how to reach agreements in bargaining problems despite their conflicting motives.
In this talk, I will present three experimental studies investigating 5-year-old children’s decision-making in situations comprising a conflict of interest. This age group was chosen because previous work has revealed first competencies at cooperative conflict resolution in late preschoolers but has also highlighted interesting failures in children’s abilities to agree on fair outcomes. In each study, pairs of children were repeatedly presented with two resource divisions in face-to-face bargaining interactions in which they could freely communicate. One of the resource divisions was fair and provided both children with an equal number of rewards. The other was unfair and always provided one child with a larger number of rewards (Fig. 1). In Study 1, children were interdependent and had to pick the same division to be rewarded. Children were more likely to agree on the fair than the unfair division and this tendency increased over trials. However, their agreements were also skewed in favor of socially dominant children: pairs were more likely to choose the unfair division if the child benefitting from that division was dominant (dominance was assessed via a resource monopolization test).
Study 2 was similar to Study 1, except that one child of the pair could pick a resource division alone and their partner could not actively interfere (as in a Dictator Game). Results showed that dominance asymmetries still affected children’s choices but interacted with fairness concerns: when children chose between a selfish and an equal division (advantageous inequality), they were less likely to pick the selfish division if their partner was dominant. By contrast, when children chose between an equal division and an unequal division that put themselves at a disadvantage (disadvantageous inequality), they tended to pick the equal division regardless of whether their partner was dominant.
Study 3 used the same general paradigm as Study 1, except that the child disadvantaged by the unfair resource division was sometimes given access to an outside option providing them with access to a small but certain reward while leaving their partner empty-handed. This granted them leverage they could use to assure they were treated fairly. The results confirmed that, overall, children gravitate towards fair resource divisions in their cooperative agreements. Moreover, 5-year-olds do not often strategically use leverage to enforce fairness, although they respond appropriately to leverage when it is used. Together, these findings indicate that fairness is already an important aspect of 5-year-olds’ coordinated decision-making in conflict situations, but also that their bargaining agreements are easily swayed by other social dynamics like dominance asymmetries.

Authors

• Sebastian Grueneisen, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie
  Presenting Author

• Michael Tomasello, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author