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The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness
Stella C Gerdemann1,2, Katherine McAuliffe3, Peter R Blake4
1Department of Early Child Development, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.
Insights
Older children experience negative emotions when they gain an advantage unfairly, indicating a developing sense of fairness. This emotional response emerges before they reject unfair offers, highlighting the early roots of fairness in social emotions.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Social Neuroscience
- Moral Psychology
Background:
- The origins of human fairness are rooted in social emotions, but their development in early childhood is not well understood.
- Investigating children's emotional responses to unfairness is crucial for understanding the ontogeny of fairness.
- Advantageous unfairness, where an individual benefits from an inequitable distribution, presents a unique challenge to fairness development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine if and when children aged 4-10 exhibit negative social emotions in response to advantageous unfairness.
- To explore the developmental trajectory of emotional responses to inequity in children.
- To differentiate emotional responses in social versus non-social contexts.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a Kinect depth sensor to measure children's body posture as an indicator of negative social emotions.
- Presented children with scenarios involving fair (1,1) and advantageous unfair (4,1) resource distributions with a peer.
- Included a non-social control condition where resources were allocated to a container.
Main Results:
- Older children (but not younger) displayed more negative emotional indicators (reduced upper body posture) in response to advantageous unfairness compared to fair outcomes.
- Younger children showed more negative emotions in response to fair splits than to advantageous inequity.
- Emotional responses to advantageous unfairness were specific to the social context and not observed in the non-social condition.
Conclusions:
- Children's negative emotional responses to advantageous unfairness develop with age and are linked to social contexts.
- The emotional foundation for fairness, specifically negative emotions towards benefiting from unfairness, emerges in childhood.
- These findings suggest that emotional responses to advantageous unfairness precede the behavioral rejection of such offers in development.
Abstract:
Humans have a deeply rooted sense of fairness, but its emotional foundation in early ontogeny remains poorly understood. Here, we asked if and when 4- to 10-year-old children show negative social emotions, such as shame or guilt, in response to advantageous unfairness expressed through a lowered body posture (measured using a Kinect depth sensor imaging camera). We found that older, but not younger children, showed more negative emotions, i.e. a reduced upper body posture, after unintentionally disadvantaging a peer on (4,1) trials than in response to fair (1,1) outcomes between themselves and others. Younger children, in contrast, expressed more negative emotions in response to the fair (1,1) split than in response to advantageous inequity. No systematic pattern of children's emotional responses was found in a non-social context, in which children divided resources between themselves and a non-social container. Supporting individual difference analyses showed that older children in the social context expressed negative emotions in response to advantageous inequity without directly acting on this negative emotional response by rejecting an advantageously unfair offer proposed by an experimenter at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional foundation of the human sense of fairness and suggest that children's negative emotional response to advantageous unfairness developmentally precedes their rejection of advantageously unfair resource distributions.
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