title: Costly third-party punishment in young children.
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-party punishment 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States; Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States; Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States. Electronic address: katherine.mcauliffe@yale.edu.
authors.forename: Katherine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: McAuliffe
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States; Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
authors.forename: Jillian J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Jordan
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States.
authors.forename: Felix
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Warneken
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011678:Punishment / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: Cooperation; Fairness; Inequity aversion; Social cognition; Third-party punishment