Children Increase Sharing to Collaborators, but Restrict Equality to the Spoils of Collaboration

• In Event: 1-091 - A Cross-Cultural Exploration of the Role of Interdependence in Children’s Cooperative Motivations

Integrative Statement

One of the hallmarks of human societies is our tendency to cooperate with others, often at a significant personal cost. For cooperation to be maintained in a society, cooperators must find ways to distribute resources that are mutually satisfactory. Thus, when considered as a way of distributing resources that satisfy everyone’s claims, fairness is a key component of cooperative success within human societies. Collaborating to earn resources is hypothesized be an important context where fairness concerns are particularly pronounced because of the state of interdependence created between collaborators (Baumard et al., 2013; Tomasello et al., 2012).
Recent empirical evidence supports this hypothesis finding that three-year-olds divide collaboratively earned resources equally, suggesting that fairness concerns emerge much earlier in ontogeny than previously believed (Hamann al., 2011; Warneken et al., 2011). The current study makes two unique contributions; first, it explores the influence of specific components of interdependent collaborative interactions to better understand the cognitive foundations of this precocious egalitarianism, and second, it extends the study of the precocious influence of collaboration on fairness across diverse societies.
To investigate the components of collaboration on children’s sharing, the influence of earning resources, achieving a shared goal, and engaging socially were compared. Pairs of participants (n=140 dyads) were sampled from two populations; a rural community in Eastern Canada and a rural community founded on principles of human unity in Southern India. Sharing between age- and gender-matched pairs of 3- to 5-year-old children was measured, before (baseline) and after (post-social) three conditions of social interaction: Joint Resources, Joint Goal, and Social Play.
In Canada, children shared more after collaboration, both when resources were earned collaboratively and after achieving a separate Joint Goal (Figure 1). Importantly, when the resources shared were earned through collaboration, Canadian children increased equal sharing (i.e., 2 items each). However, when resources were given as a windfall after collaborating towards a shared (different) goal, children shared more overall (e.g. increasing from 0 to 1 item shared), but did not shift towards equity. These effects were not dependent on the age of participants. In India, it was only when resources shared were earned in the collaboration game that children increased sharing (Figure 2), an effect that was dependent on age, and emerged only for older children. Social play was not found to influence children’s sharing in either population, highlighting the importance of the collaborative context to increase children’s sharing.
Overall, these findings suggest that while collaboration fostered increased sharing in both cultural contexts, a preference for equity showed greater sensitivity to diversity of early social experience. Additionally, collaborating to earn resources appears to be a special context for the development of fairness, given the finding that in this context Canadian children showed a greater increase in equitable sharing and older Indian children showed a general increase in sharing. Importantly, this study provides support for the general importance of collaboration in the development of fairness (Tomasello et al., 2012), while highlighting diversity in the emergence of the collaboration-fairness relation across diverse societies.

Author

• John Corbit, Saint Francis Xavier University
  Presenting Author