Toddlers can understand fairness as young as 15 months, study says
October 7, 2011
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Jim Wilkes Staff Reporter
Toddlers have already developed a sense of fairness and altruism, even as they’re learning to walk and talk, according to a new study released Friday.
“The surprising finding in the study was that in the second year of life, it appears that kids already have expectations about what are fair and what are unfair outcomes,” said Jessica Sommerville, Toronto-born associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington.
“We also see instances of what you might call altruistic behaviour, kids’ willingness to share valued objects with a stranger.”
The findings, published online by the journal PLoS ONE suggest that children as young as 15 months already have a well developed sense of sharing and are aware when others share things unequally.
“It is surprising because people tend to think that things like fairness and altruism are highly abstract concepts not usually associated with infants,” Sommerville told the Toronto Star.
She and co-author Marco Schmidt, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, observed 15-month-olds as they watched videos of people sharing crackers or milk. In some cases equal amounts of the food were given; in others, one person was given more than the other.
“We know from prior work that infants will show increases in looking time and visual attention when they think something is surprisingly, unusual or if it violates an expectation they hold,” Sommerville explained.
“What we found was that infants were more attentive, they looked longer at the unequal outcome, suggesting there was something unusual or unexpected to infants about that outcome.”
She said an interesting question for further study is “whether there’s a judgment component, that infants perhaps negatively evaluate someone who distributed food unequally.”
“We need to track kids to see if sharing attitudes remain constant as they grow.”
In another task, infants were asked by a stranger to share one of two toys – an ordinary LEGO block and a more elaborate LEGO doll – after determining which was the child’s preferred toy.
Researchers found that 92 percent of the infants who shared their preferred toy spent more time looking at the unequal distributions of food. The study calls them “altruistic sharers.”
Just 86 percent of infants who shared their less-preferred toy, so-called “selfish sharers,” paid more attention when food was equally shared.
“The altruistic sharers were really sensitive to the violation of fairness in the food task,” Sommerville said.
Selfish sharers showed an almost opposite effect, she added.