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Published August 27, 2016 | Version v1
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Data from: The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies

Creators

  • 1. Boston University
  • 2. Yale University
  • 3. Simon Fraser University
  • 4. St. Francis Xavier University
  • 5. Cheikh Anta Diop University
  • 6. Harvard University
  • 7. University of Utah

Description

A sense of fairness plays a critical role in supporting human cooperation. Adult norms of fair resource sharing vary widely across societies, suggesting that culture shapes the acquisition of fairness behaviour during childhood. Here we examine how fairness behaviour develops in children from seven diverse societies, testing children from 4 to 15 years of age (n = 866 pairs) in a standardized resource decision task. We measured two key aspects of fairness decisions: disadvantageous inequity aversion (peer receives more than self) and advantageous inequity aversion (self receives more than a peer). We show that disadvantageous inequity aversion emerged across all populations by middle childhood. By contrast, advantageous inequity aversion was more variable, emerging in three populations and only later in development. We discuss these findings in relation to questions about the universality and cultural specificity of human fairness.

Notes

Ontogeny_fairness_seven_societies_data
Long form data for Blake, McAuliffe, Corbit, Callaghan, Barry, Bowie, Kleutsch, Kramer, Ross, Vongsachang, Wrangham & Warneken
Data and R code for The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies
Data in long form and R statistical code
Ontogeny_fairness_seven_societies_data_code.zip

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Additional details

Related works

Is cited by
10.1038/nature15703 (DOI)