024: How (and when) does my child understand fairness?

We talked a while ago about sharing, and how you can understand the developmental processes that your child needs to go through before s/he truly understands what it means to share. One of the inputs to sharing behavior is an understanding of what is fair, and Drs. Peter Blake and Katie McAuliffe talk us through what we know about what children understand about fairness.  This episode will help you to understand how much of the idea of fairness is naturally culturally transmitted to children and what you can do to encourage a sense of fairness in your child, which is important for their own social well-being and for the benefit of our society – this has implications for ideas like the development of perceptions about race and gender that we’ll be talking more about in upcoming episodes.   References Blake, P.R., Corbit, J., Callaghan, T.C., & Warneken, F. (2016). Give as I give: Adult influence on children’s giving in two cultures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 152, 149-160. DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.07.010 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. (2015). The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies. Nature 528, 258-261. DOI:10.1038/nature15703 Blake, P.R., Rand, D.G., Tingley, D., & Warneken, F. (2015). The shadow of the future promotes cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma for children. Scientific Reports 5, Article number 14559. DOI: 10.1038/srep14559 Blake, P.R., & McAuliffe, K. (2011). “I had so much it didn’t seem fair”: Eight-year-olds reject two forms of inequity. Cognition 120, 215-224. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.006 Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chernyak, N., & Kushnir, T. (2013). Giving preschoolers choice increases sharing behavior. Psychological Science 24, 1971-1979. Jordan, J.J., McAuliffe, K., & Warneken, F. (2014). Development of in-group favoritism in children’s third-party punishment of selfishness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111(35), 12710-12715. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1402280111 McAuliffe, K., Blake, P.R., Steinbeis, N., & Warneken, F. (2017). The developmental foundations of human fairness.  Nature (Human Behavior) 1 (Article 00042), 1-9. McAuliffe, K., Jordan, J.J., & Warneken, F. (2015). Costly third-party punishment in young children. Cognition 134, 1-10. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.013 Schmuckler, M.A. (2001). What is ecological validity? A dimensional analysis. Infancy 2(4), 419-436. Full article available at: http://utsc.utoronto.ca/~marksch/Schmuckler%202001.pdf   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:30] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called What Do Children Understand About Fairness? And I have two very special guests with me to discuss this topic. Dr Peter Blake earned has doctorate in education at Harvard University and is currently an Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. His research focuses on three important foundations of human life, cooperation, fairness and ownership, and so he asks questions in his research like when should you share and when should you compete for resources? Is equal always fair or can you sometimes keep more for yourself? And how do you know when a toy is owned and what does that mean? Right now he’s working on extending projects, the different cultures, so we can better understand whether children in all cultures develop in similar ways at similar times and what cultural variables influence that development. Welcome Dr Blake. Dr. Blake: [01:21] Thank you. Jen:   [01:22] And Dr. Katie McAuliffe is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College, which I just learned as different from Boston University. She two studies, the development and evolution of cooperation in humans with a special focus on how children acquire and enforced fairness norms. She’s made the rounds of Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge, and her educational career. I think the only one she’s missing is Oxford. Welcome Dr McAuliffe. Dr. McAuliffe:  [01:44] Hi; nice to be here. Thanks. Jen:     [01:45] Thank you so much for being here. So let’s start with a question that seems really simple, but I’m guessing there’s probably more to it than, than maybe I might imagine. Can you tell us what fairness is? Dr. Blake: [01:56] Yeah, that’s, that’s the big question and it is a very complicated answer. So fairness is a, is a very complex concept, particularly for adults and we know that equal is not always fair, but equality does provide a kind of starting point for us to understand how children figure out what is fair and what is not. So we tend to focus our research in a couple of ways. One way is that we focus on the allocation of resources which has also been called distributive justice, how you distribute resources between people. So we focus on that aspect of fairness as opposed to social status and things like that. And we also focus around this idea of equality and particularly what happens. How did children respond when they get less and get more than other kids. Dr. McAuliffe: [02:51] And I think studying how fairness develops in childhood is a nice way of showing how flexible the concept is. Because when we look at how children begin to think about fairness, you can see that what it means to be fair really varies depending on whether you’re a two year old or an eight year old. Jen:    [03:08] How does that change? Dr. McAuliffe:  [03:09] Well, we can kind of get into that with lots of different studies, but maybe a sort of broad way to characterize the change, and this is based on work that was really done in the seventies is that fairness tends to start out as being quite self focused. So I want to make sure that I’m getting a good deal, and it goes through a period of sort of really caring about equality as Peter said, as a sort of benchmark of justice and then it becomes much more nuanced or you can take different perspectives into account and understand that sometimes someone is more deserving or more needy and therefore inequality is acceptable under certain situations. Jen:  [03:46] Most of the parents listening to this show are parents of toddlers and, and some parents of preschoolers. And I know that you start to study children kind of around about age four or five years. Why don’t you study children younger than that? What is it that makes that difficult? Dr. Blake:   [04:01] It’s primarily that there’s very different methods that are used for, for infants and toddlers, largely because they don’t have the verbal skills yet to do some of the tasks. We have tried to test children as young as three in some of our experiments. That works fine, but younger than that, we’ve found that they don’t do well on our tasks, but other people do research…have done research on infants. And one key thing that they found going back to this idea of equality is that even at about 15 months of age, infants expect resources to be distributed equally between two people. And they expect adults to divide things like food and toys equally. They’re surprised when this doesn’t happen. And this has...