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  • January 2015
  • Article
  • Cognition

Costly Third-party Punishment in Young Children

By: Katherine McAuliffe, Jillian J. Jordan and Felix Warneken
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Abstract

Human adults engage in costly third-party punishment of unfair behavior, but the developmental origins of this behavior are unknown. Here we investigate costly third-partypunishment in 5- and 6-year-old children. Participants were asked to accept (enact) or reject (punish) proposed allocations of resources between a pair of absent, anonymous children. In addition, we manipulated whether subjects had to pay a cost to punish proposed allocations. Experiment 1 showed that 6-year-olds (but not 5-year-olds) punished unfair proposals more than fair proposals. However, children punished less when doing so was personally costly. Thus, while sensitive to cost, they were willing to sacrifice resources to intervene against unfairness. Experiment 2 showed that 6-year-olds were less sensitive to unequal allocations when they resulted from selfishness than generosity. These findings show that costly third-party punishment of unfair behavior is present in young children, suggesting that from early in development children show a sophisticated capacity to promote fair behavior.

Keywords

Third-party Punishment; Inequity Aversion; Social Cognition; Cooperation; Fairness; Behavior

Citation

McAuliffe, Katherine, Jillian J. Jordan, and Felix Warneken. "Costly Third-party Punishment in Young Children." Cognition 134 (January 2015): 1–10.
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About The Author

Jillian J. Jordan

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
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