Studies Because of defiance, children reject inequality

Study: Out of spite, children reject inequality

25/12/2014

If children would receive less than their counterpart, they will reject it despite defiance to divide. This is the conclusion of a study from the USA. So far, it has not been clear that, as with some animals, frustration is not the reason for rejecting inequality.

Children refuse to share it
In defiance, children refuse to share if they receive less than theirs. This is the result of a US study, according to news agencies APA and dpa. The researchers published their findings in the journal „Biology Letters“ the British Royal Society. It has not been clear yet whether frustration is the reason for rejecting inequality, as is the case with some animals.

People reject unfair situations
Compared to animals, the ability to cooperate with strangers in humans is particularly pronounced. However, people tend to reject unfair situations, especially if they are disadvantaged themselves. To avoid this, people are even willing to give up things so that others do not benefit. Even four-year-olds behave as studies have shown. Based on comparative research with animals, it is believed that this aversion could have phylogenetic, ie phylogenetic roots. This is because "even some animals reject a less valuable resource when they see that a conspecific has received a better reward". The motives for such a behavior are "however largely unclear".

Researchers are investigating malicious behavior
It is believed that frustration is the main cause of this behavior in animals. In humans, however, it is believed that defiance triggers rejection. Individuals correct the rank that the privileged individual has by rejecting unfavorable injustice. This means that it is better for one, when both have nothing, than when the other has more than you. The reason for this adverse behavior was now a research team to the behavioral psychologist Katherine McAuliffe from Yale University. For this, the scientists created a game situation in which sweets were distributed differently in several experiments. It included children of different age groups as well as adults, who could accept or reject a differently distributed reward.

Despite as motivating motivation
In each case, two situations were tested: Acceptance in the first case meant that the test person himself received a lower reward than a member of the study team sitting opposite. When rejected, however, both received nothing. In the other test situation, the seat neighbor received either way a larger amount of candy. The test person was only able to influence by her behavior, whether she herself got a lesser or no sweet reward. As it turned out, children between the ages of four and nine in the first series of tests decided in the majority of cases so that none of the participants in the game got a reward. This behavior speaks for the researchers that defiance is the driving motivation. If it were frustration, the children would have rejected in the second series of experiments predominantly. But that was not the case.

Older children show more selfless behavior
Older children and adults, on the other hand, often showed a more selfless behavior, contented themselves with less, and treated their counterparts the greater reward. However, the scientists suspect that "given the experimental setup, at least the adults feared being considered unfavorable and therefore adapting their behavior to social norms". The behavioral psychologists pleaded for a closer look at the age at which children are able to respond to defiance without defiance. The study states: „This ability fits into the emerging picture of deep roots of developmental history that has the complex human behavior of cooperation and competition.“

Toddlers with sense of justice
The fact that people develop a sense of justice very early on is also shown by older studies. For example, in 2011, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, demonstrated in a study of children aged 15 months that these are already over in terms of distribution of biscuits and milk have a pronounced sense of justice.

Moral from the age of 3 years
From moral values ​​such as justice, toddlers already know from the age of three years. US psychologists found out in another study that children at this age are still unable to put the sense of justice into practice. Only schoolchildren older than six can renounce their own advantage in the interests of justice and fairness (University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA) in the trade magazine „Plos One). (Ad)