Poster #65 - What Explains Implicit Fairness Preferences in Children and Adults?

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

A sense of fairness is crucial for maintaining social relationships in everyday life. Past research found that the development of fairness preferences in humans is characterized by a shift from self-serving bias to more egalitarian principles (Fehr et al., 2008). Moreover, research using behavioral paradigms has shown that while even young children show aversion to unfair allocations that disadvantage themselves (disadvantageous inequity), aversion to unfair allocations that advantage themselves (advantageous inequity) only emerge in late childhood (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011). It is unclear whether older children and adults show advantageous inequity aversion because they have strong internalized fairness preferences, or because they have learned to inhibit their self-serving tendencies to behave in socially acceptable ways.

Here we use a recently developed method to examine implicit attitudes about inequity aversion using the Fairness Implicit Association Test (Burns, 2020). In this test, children and adults see images of equal and unequal allocations along with positive and negative words and are asked to sort these stimuli to their corresponding categories (See Figure 1). Implicit fairness attitudes are measured by D-scores, which indicate the degree to which participants are faster at matching e.g. fair-positive to unfair-positive. An initial series of experiments found that children as young as 5 years old and adults showed implicit preference for fairness over disadvantageous inequity (less for self), but not preference for fairness over advantageous inequity (more for self).

The current project aims to replicate and extend these initial findings by testing whether the phenomenon is genuinely social or if other non-social processes are at work. In a first study with N = 261 adults, we tested whether visual preferences could explain the initial findings. By comparing a Value Condition (where circles represented valuable tokens distributed between the self and another person) with a No-Value Condition (where the same circles were not associated with values), we found that adults showed implicit preferences for fairness over disadvantageous but not advantageous inequity in the Value Condition, which differed significantly from the pattern in the No-Value Condition (Figure 2). This shows that the original findings cannot be explained by visual preferences and represent genuine social preferences about fair resource distributions.

In a second study, we aim to test why neither adults nor children show an implicit preference for advantageous inequity. We hypothesize that there exists an inherent conflict between receiving more for the self and establishing fair outcomes in the original design, and that participants have a preference for receiving more resources than less resources when it occurs in a non-social context. Therefore, we are comparing a Social Condition (where resources go toward the self versus another participant) with a Non-Social Condition (where participants either obtain or not obtain resources). This study will be conducted online and pilot data with N = 25 6 to 10 year old children shows that they are able to understand and complete the online task. By comparing children and adults’ performance in this study, we will gain additional insights on the psychological processes underlying inequity aversion.

Authors

• Yiyan Wang, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author

• Monica Patricia Burns

• Felix Warneken, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor