The Development of Responses to Unfairness in Children

Abstract

In our daily life, we often experience moral outrage when we hear news about perpetrators who treated others unfairly even if we are not the victim. We also think that perpetrators should receive punishment they deserve. In fact, research shows that adults are often willing to pay a cost to intervene against such fairness norm violations even when they are an uninvolved third party. This so-called third-party punishment is striking because it cannot be easily explained by self-interested motivations. If people were rational agents who try to maximize their own payoffs, they would not pay any costs to intervene in third-party transgressions. Thus, third-party punishment has often been considered as an index of one’s sense of fairness. However, despite its theoretical importance, in the field of developmental psychology, its underlying mechanisms and developmental trajectories have been relatively understudied. This dissertation includes four sets of studies to assess following questions: (a) When do children start to engage in and reason about third-party punishment? (b) What motivates third-party punishment in children? To answer the first question, by testing a wide age range (age 5 to 9), I found that with age, children’s punishment becomes increasingly selective (Study 1 & 2). That is, over development, children are less likely to punish fair allocations, while they become more likely to punish unfair allocations. Further, from age 7, children start to think of third-party punishment as a way to reduce inequality between two other individuals (Study 4).

To answer the second question, I examined the influences of children’s own experience (Study 2) and the possibility of future interactions (Study 3) on third-party punishment, respectively. I found that neither robustly influenced third-party punishment in children. Rather, children enact third-party punishment in a way that could restore equality between two other people (Study 1), suggesting that their punishment is motivated by fairness concerns. However, despite children’s use of punishment to rectify inequality, I found that children prefer third-party helpers over third-party punishers (Study 4), which questions the extent to which children endorse third-party punishment as an appropriate intervention against unfairness.

Taken together, four sets of studies suggest that third-party punishment in children reflects their fairness concern. This dissertation elucidates the development and motivations of third-party punishment in children.