Generous and fair: Children's preferences for cooperative partners in India and Canada

Treating cooperative partners fairly is hypothesized to be an adaptive strategy to maintain cooperative relationships. Indeed, emerging evidence suggests that adults prefer to cooperate with partners who are likely to treat them fairly, but to date little is known about how children's developing concern for fairness influences cooperative partner choice or how these preferences may vary across societies. This study investigated whether children prefer cooperative partners who are fair (discard a resource to avoid advantageous or disadvantageous distributions) or who efficiently distribute resources but create inequality (give a resource to create either advantageous or disadvantageous distributions). We recruited N = 252 children (4-9 years of age, N = 131 Female) from India and Canada. Children learned about the resource allocation behavior of two potential partners for a cooperative game. Each partner received one candy for themselves, one for a peer, and had an extra candy to either distribute (creating inequality) or discard (creating equality). On advantageous trials, partners could keep or discard the extra candy; on disadvantageous trials, they could give it to a peer or discard it. In both countries, children showed a greater tendency to choose partners who achieve equality by giving up a personal advantage, over those who achieve equality by preventing a partner from gaining an advantage, a tendency that increased with age. These findings reveal that children across diverse societies prefer cooperative partners who behave fairly by giving up a personal advantage and those who behave generously by allowing their partners to gain an advantage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).