Fighting unfairness

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-08/hu-fu081514.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 18-Aug-2014

Contact: Peter Reuell
Harvard University
Fighting unfairness
Study finds children as young as 6 are biased toward their social group when combating unfairness

Just about every parent is familiar with the signs: the crying, the stomping feet and pouting lips, all of which are usually followed by a collapse to the floor and a wailed insistence that, "It's not fair!"

While most people – including many parents – see such tantrums merely as part of growing up, a new study conducted by Harvard scientists suggests that, even at a relatively young age, children have advanced ideas about fairness, and are willing to pay a personal price to intervene in what they believe are unfair situations, even when they have not been personally disadvantaged – but that their reactions to unfairness are biased by in-group favoritism.

The study, co-authored by Harvard John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Felix Warneken, former Harvard undergrad Jillian Jordan who is now a Ph.D student at Yale and Katherine McAuliffe, a former Harvard Ph.D. student who is now a post-doctoral fellow at Yale, showed that, when reacting to unfair behavior, children as young as six were biased toward members of their own social group. By age eight, however, children were more likely to intervene to stop any selfish behavior, whether or not the victim was a member of their group. The study is described in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"People have looked at this phenomenon extensively in adults, but this is the first time we've been able to investigate it in children," said Warneken. "The idea that children would care about inequity happening between individuals who aren't there, that in itself is somewhat surprising. They care about justice or fairness and are willing to intervene against selfish actions, and are even willing to pay a cost to do that."

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"In six-year-olds, we found that there were two types of in-group bias," Jordan explained. "First, they were more lenient in their punishment of selfish behavior that came from a member of their own group, and second, they were harsher in their punishment of selfish behavior that harmed a member of their group."

While eight-year-olds showed the same lenience when selfish behavior came from a member of their own group, Jordan and colleagues were surprised to find that they were equally willing to punish selfish behavior that harmed members of either group.

"The eight-year-olds were less biased than the six-year-olds," Jordan explained. "They were more willing to pay personal costs, and were less biased in the sense that they felt it was equally bad to treat people selfishly, regardless of what group they were in. They started to see out-group members as legitimate victims, or just as legitimate as in-group members."

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