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In the context of economic games, adults sacrifice money to avoid unequal outcomes, showing so-called inequity aversion. Child-friendly adaptations of these games have shown that children, too, show inequity aversion. Moreover, inequity aversion shows a clear developmental trajectory, with young children rejecting only disadvantageously unequal distributions and older children rejecting both disadvantageously and advantageously unequal distributions. However, based on existing work, it is difficult to compare adult and child responses to inequity because (1) adapting economic games to make them child-friendly may importantly alter the dynamics of the fairness interaction and (2) adult work typically uses abstract rewards such as money while work with children typically uses more concrete rewards like candy, stickers or toys. Here we adapted the Inequity Game—a paradigm designed to study children's responses to inequality in isolation from other concerns—to test inequity aversion in adults (N = 104 pairs). We manipulated whether participants made decisions about concrete rewards (candy) or abstract rewards (tokens that could be traded in for money). We found that, like children, adults rejected unequal payoffs in this task. Additionally, we found that reward type mattered: adults rejected disadvantageous—but not advantageous—monetary distributions, yet rejected both disadvantageous and advantageous candy distributions. These findings allow us to draw clearer comparisons across child and adult responses to unfairness and help paint a fuller picture of inequity aversion in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are unique in their propensity for helping. Not only do we help others in need by reacting to their requests, we also help proactively by assisting in the absence of a request. Proactive helping requires the actor to detect the need for help, recognize the intention of the other, and remedy the situation. Very little is known about the development of this social phenomenon beyond an urban, industrialized setting. We examined helping in nineteen two- to five-year old children in small-scale rural villages of Vanuatu. In the experimental condition, the intentions of the experimenter were made salient, whereas in the control condition they were ambiguous. Children helped more often in the experimental compared to the control condition, suggesting that the propensity to monitor others’ goals and act accordingly can be detected in different cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults and children are willing to sacrifice personal gain to avoid both disadvantageous and advantageous inequity. These two forms of inequity aversion follow different developmental trajectories, with disadvantageous inequity aversion emerging around 4 years and advantageous inequity aversion emerging around 8 years. Although inequity aversion is assumed to be specific to situations where resources are distributed among individuals, the role of social context has not been tested in children. Here, we investigated the influence of two aspects of social context on inequity aversion in 4- to 9-year-old children: (1) the role of the experimenter distributing rewards and (2) the presence of a peer with whom rewards could be shared. Experiment 1 showed that children rejected inequity at the same rate, regardless of whether the experimenter had control over reward allocations. This indicates that children’s decisions are based upon reward allocations between themselves and a peer and are not attempts to elicit more favorable distributions from the experimenter. Experiment 2 compared rejections of unequal reward allocations in children interacting with or without a peer partner. When faced with a disadvantageous distribution, children frequently rejected a smaller reward when a larger reward was visible, even if no partner would obtain the larger reward. This suggests that nonsocial factors partly explain disadvantageous inequity rejections. However, rejections of disadvantageous distributions were higher when the larger amount would go to a peer, indicating that social context enhances disadvantageous inequity aversion. By contrast, children rejected advantageous distributions almost exclusively in the social context. Therefore, advantageous inequity aversion appears to be genuinely social, highlighting its potential relevance for the development of fairness concerns. By comparing social and nonsocial factors, this study provides a detailed picture of the expression of inequity aversion in human ontogeny and raises questions about the function and evolution of inequity aversion in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merit is a key principle of fairness: rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task. Previous research suggests that children have an early ability to take merit into account in third-party situations but that merit-based sharing in first-party contexts does not emerge until school-age. Here we provide evidence that three- and five-year-old children already use merit to share resources with others, even when sharing is costly for the child. In Study 1, a child and a puppet-partner collected coins that were later exchanged for rewards. We varied the work-contribution of both partners by manipulating how many coins each partner collected. Children kept fewer stickers in trials in which they had contributed less than in trials in which they had contributed more than the partner, showing that they took merit into account. Few children, however, gave away more than half of the stickers when the partner had worked more. Study 2 confirmed that children related their own work-contribution to their partner's, rather than simply focusing on their own contribution. Taken together, these studies show that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children; however it remains constrained by a self-serving bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental evidence reveals that chimpanzees will help other unrelated humans and conspecifics without a reward, showing that they share crucial aspects of altruism with humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]