The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies

• Published in: Nature (London) 2015-12, Vol.528 (7581), p.258-261
• Main Authors: Blake, P. R., McAuliffe, K., Corbit, J., Callaghan, T. C., Barry, O., Bowie, A., Kleutsch, L., Kramer, K. L., Ross, E., Vongsachang, H., Wrangham, R., Warneken, F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 631/181/1403; 631/477/2811; Adolescent; Age Factors; Child; Child, Preschool; Cooperative Behavior; Culture; Decision Making - physiology; Equality; Female; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Justice; letter; Male; multidisciplinary; Science; Social Behavior; Social Change; Society
• ISSN: 0028-0836; 1476-4687
• DOI: 10.1038/nature15703

An analysis of when children develop a sense of fairness (receiving less or more than a peer) is compared across seven different societies; aversion to receiving less emerges early in childhood in all societies, whereas aversion to receiving more emerges later in childhood and only in three of the seven societies studied. When children think 'that's not fair' Previous research has shown that children develop a sense of fairness during childhood, but it is not known how the two components of this — aversion to being unfairly treated and aversion to seeing others unfairly treated — vary across cultures. These authors conducted experiments in seven cultures and find that aversion to being unfairly treated emerges early in childhood and consistently across cultures. Aversion to seeing others unfairly treated emerges later in childhood and is only seen in the experiment in three of the seven cultures studied. A sense of fairness plays a critical role in supporting human cooperation 1 , 2 , 3 . Adult norms of fair resource sharing vary widely across societies, suggesting that culture shapes the acquisition of fairness behaviour during childhood 4 , 5 . Here we examine how fairness behaviour develops in children from seven diverse societies, testing children from 4 to 15 years of age ( n  = 866 pairs) in a standardized resource decision task 6 , 7 . We measured two key aspects of fairness decisions: disadvantageous inequity aversion (peer receives more than self) and advantageous inequity aversion (self receives more than a peer). We show that disadvantageous inequity aversion emerged across all populations by middle childhood. By contrast, advantageous inequity aversion was more variable, emerging in three populations and only later in development. We discuss these findings in relation to questions about the universality and cultural specificity of human fairness.