Children Demand an Equal Share of Worthless Objects

Abstract

A key milestone in the development of fairness is disadvantageous inequity aversion: a willingness to sacrifice valuable rewards to avoid receiving less than a peer. The equal respect hypothesis suggests that, in addition to material concerns, children are also motivated to reject disadvantageous inequity due to interpersonal concerns. To test this prediction, we investigated how young children (N = 184, ages 4–7) respond to receiving less of the objects they explicitly do not desire across three pre-registered experiments. We found that, from 4 years old, children are averse to receiving unequal offers of undesirable objects (Experiment 1) and are even willing to sacrifice a high-value reward to reject inequality of undesirable objects (Experiment 2). Children are less likely to refuse unequal offers of undesirable objects when the distributor provides a reason for giving them less (Experiment 3). Together, these studies demonstrate that interpersonal concerns play a key role in motivating the costly rejection of inequity.

Summary

• 4–7-year-olds reject unequal allocations of worthless objects despite not liking them (Experiment 1).
• Children even sacrifice a high-value reward to reject unequal allocations of worthless objects (Experiment 2).
• Children reject unequal allocations less often when given a reason for the unequal distribution by the distributor (Experiment 3).
• This suggests that interpersonal concerns play a key role in motivating the costly rejection of inequity, independent of material consequences.