Category Archives: fairness

Warneken: Young children share the spoils after collaboration

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Warneken, F., Lohse, K., Melis, A. P., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Young children share the spoils after collaboration. Psychological Science, 22(2), 267–73. http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610395392

Interesting paper.

1) The authors postulate that the relationship between joint collaboration and sharing is crucial for understanding the origins of equality, both in ontogeny and phylogeny. Therefore, they investigate how children actively divide rewards after working for them in a collaborative problem-solving task.

Most studies on sharing involve windfall situations, in which resources are given to the children by a third party, with no work or effort involved. Moreover, many studies use a forced-choice paradigm with predefined allocation options, which does not allow for an assessment of how children themselves would actively negotiate over how to distribute resources with another person.

In contrast, Warneken et al.’s research is guided by the notion that people often have to work toward obtaining resources, and that they distribute those resources actively, rather than choosing individually between predefined options. Previous studies, they say, have not shown how children share resources in situations that might be the cradle of equality: actual joint collaborative activities with a social partner.

2) The experiment closely resembles sharing experiments with chimpanzees and other non-human primates. Warneken et al test children in dyads. Children have to perform a task together: they have to pull from both ends of a rope at the same time in order to bring a box close to them. In this way, they are able to get a reward (such as stickers or candy that have been placed in the box). In one condition, the box has two holes far apart, so that each child can get her reward without interference from the other participant. In a second (“clumped”) condition, the box has only one hole, and therefore only one child can access the rewards at a time.

3) Warneken et al. found that neither the reward type nor the opportunity to monopolize rewards in the clumped condition interfered with the children’s collaboration. 3 year-olds collaborate successfully in situations in which resources can be monopolized. The collaborative abilities of young children, compared with those of chimpanzees, are not constrained to the same extent by a tendency to monopolize resources.

Children predominately produced equal shares. They shared rewards equally most of the time, even when rewards could be monopolized more easily (clumped condition). At an age when children are just beginning to skillfully collaborate with peers, they already engage in sharing behavior that results in equitable outcomes.

4) What does it all mean? Competition over resources, the authors claim, is mitigated in human children (when compared with chimpanzees and other primates) by an emerging sense of equal sharing of the spoils, which enables successful collaboration even early in ontogeny. Thus, the authors claim that this study supports a Tomasello-like evolutionary hypothesis, according to which the emergence of cooperation is due not only to cognitive and behavioral skills, but also to a reduction in competition over resources. Competition over resources is mitigated in human children by an emerging sense of equal sharing of the spoils, which enables successful collaboration even early in ontogeny.

5) According to this study, children are capable of equitable distributions a very early age. Although many studies place the origins of equality at around 5, 6 or even 7 years of age, it all depends on how the concrete distribution problem is presented to the children. Warneken et al. present children with a collaborative, non-competitive situation. In addition, in this study the peer is present; the dyad works together in a problem solving activity (compare this with economic games that are played by a single present individual and an absent, anonymous, “invisible”). Even more, some of the dyads comprise children who know each other well, since they attend the same day-care center (they are not one-shot interactions, as in most economic games). All this seems to help even 3 year-olds to produce equitable outcomes early in development. The authors reach the conclusion that, perhaps, children learn to acknowledge each other’s right to gain equal resources in situations in which they collaborate to produce a mutually beneficial outcome that one person acting alone would not be able to achieve (this result is not proven by the experiment, in my opinion).

Paulus & Moore On Recipient-Dependent Sharing Behavior and Expectations

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This study aimed at investigating developmental changes in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children’s sharing behavior and their expectations of others’ sharing. Children were administered two tasks. In the Self task, they could distribute valuable items between themselves and a friend or a disliked peer; in the Other task, they were asked to predict how another agent would distribute valuable items between himself and a friend or a disliked peer. Additionally, whether sharing was costly for the agents or not was manipulated. Three results:

  1. Basic prosocial orientation: Children of all age groups behaved more prosocially and expected more prosocial behavior from another protagonist when the choice bore no cost. This is kind of an obvious result in view of the existing literature. Previous studies have shown that children act prosocially from early on and distribute resources equally between others. Children also have a corresponding expectation that others will behave prosocially. Even 2-year-olds show a sensitivity for equal distributions in a looking-time task. By 3 years, children showed a general disposition to expect that someone will share with others; at this age, children possess an undifferentiated expectation that humans behave prosocially toward each other.
  2. Recipient-dependent sharing: However, 4- and 5-year-old children, but not 3-year-old children, differentiated between a friend and a disliked peer as potential recipients in the sharing and the sharing expectation tasks. Thus, the study found developmental changes, with 3-year-old children not differentiating between different recipients (the 3-year-old children decided to act prosocially in the majority of trials) and 4- and 5-year-old children showing a clear differentiation. The 4- and 5-year-old children expected someone to share more with a friend than with a disliked peer, indicating specific expectations of how the relationship between an agent and another person affects the probability of showing prosocial behavior. This shows that the undifferentiated expectation that people generally share with others becomes differentiated in the course of the preschool period.
  3. Relationship between first-person behavior and third-person expectations: The same developmental trend was found for children’s own sharing and their expectations of other people’s sharing behavior, suggesting that both show a parallel developmental progression on a group level. Moreover, at 5 years of age, but not at 3 or 4 years, sharing behavior and sharing expectations were on a personal level closely related to each other. In other terms, a within-subject relation was found between 5-year-old children’s own sharing behavior and their sharing expectations. In conclusion, the relation between sharing behavior and sharing expectations emerges strongly at 5 years of age.

Egalistarism and parochialism in young children

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Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., & Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young children. Nature, 454(7208), 1079–1083. http://doi.org/10.1038/nature07155

This is a classic and crucial study. The authors use an extremely simple experimental design (inspired in previous work with non-human primates) to test the hypothesis of a parallel development of children’s egalitarianism and parochialism. Children between 3 and 8 years of age are presented three situations:

  • Prosocial: either take one candy and assign one candy to another child, or take one candy and assign none to another child ((1,1) vs. (1,0).
  • Envy: either take one candy and assign one candy to another child, or take one candy and assign two candies to another child ((1,1) vs. (1,2).
  • Costly sharing: either take one candy and assign one candy to another child, or take two candies and assign none to another child ((1,1) vs. (2,0).

The study shows that children, as they grow, aim at reducing the inequality between themselves and their partner, regardless of whether the inequality is to their advantage or disadvantage.

The authors found that children at age 3–4 show little willingness to share resources (as tested by the sharing situation) but a non-negligible percentage of the children is willing to make choices that benefit the recipient if it is not costly (in the envy and prosocial situations). After this age, other-regarding preferences develop, which take the form of inequality aversion instead of a preference for increasing the partner’s or the joint payoff.

Thus, across the three situations, egalitarian choices increase with age. “If we pool the children’s choices in all three games, the percentage of children who preferred the egalitarian allocation in all three games increases from 4% at age 3–4 to 30% at age 7–8.” Also, “(…) the share of subjects who maximize the partner’s payoff by choosing both (1,1) in the prosocial game and (1,2) in the envy game decreases sharply from 43% at age 3–4 to 16% at age 7–8.” Egalitarianism rises as generosity declines.

This emphasis on equality (or inequality aversion) seems to be uniquely human; no animal shows a comparable behavioral pattern.

In addition, children (especially boys) seem to show an in-group bias. For example, in the envy game, boys tend to do egalitarian distributions (1,1) rather than generous distributions (1,2) more with the outgroup than with the ingroup. The effects of parochialism are also apparent in the other situations: In the prosocial game, the children remove inequality that favors themselves more often if the partner is an ingroup member. In the sharing game, egalitarian choices slightly decrease over time if the partner is an outgroup member, whereas sharing with ingroup members strongly increases with age

The conclusion is not only that egalitarianism and parochialism are important forces driving children’s judgments, but also that is that a utilitarian ethics seems absent from children’s minds. In other words, children do not try to maximize the total sum of benefits for everybody. That is why, in the “envy” situation, children (at least after 5 or 6 years of age) tend to prefer (1,1) over (1,2); that is, egalitarianism trumps maximization of benefits. Utilitarianism is not a factor in children’s reasoning. Equality aversion and parochialism grow between 3 and 8 years of age and explain children’s responses.

Comparing this paper with other studies, it is interesting to note that equality is said to appear at 5, or 6, or 7 or 8 years of age depending on the study, the methodology used and the way the results are interpreted (e.g., Rochat says that children at 5 are already steady defenders of strict equality and that they even can adopt an ethical stance, when they are willing to sacrifice their own resources to punish an agent that is not observing equality).

In addition, it is relevant to understand young children’s (3 and 4 year-olds) apparent discrepant or erratic behavior (sometimes they are generous, at other times they are selfish). In a previous study I claimed that the reason for this is that those children “don’t frame their relationships in terms of strict-reciprocity (tit for tat) contracts. It should be no surprise that their behavior in economic games and fairness experiments is consistent with a culture of associative reciprocity and the gift economy, which predominate in the context of familial institutions and peer relationships at this age. Preschoolers might appear as non-strategic from the point of view of economists who identify rationality with calculating the best means to achieve a desired end-result (individual profit, equality, etc.), but they are actually well adapted to their real social context. (…)  The apparently selfish tendencies of 3-year-olds moderate themselves as children mature, so that between five and seven years of age (depending on the specific study) children start demanding fairness and rejecting inequality. In certain cases, they even embrace an ethical stance and engage in costly punishment. This emerging mindset is in harmony with the strict reciprocity embedded in experiences such as bartering with peers or dealing with money and prices, which gain prominence in children’s daily life as they grow up. In the culture of adults, barter and monetary transactions are considered fair when both parties receive an equivalent value. Similarly, fair distributions between partners with the same merit are expected to be 50/50. This kind of institutional context comes to dominate children’s interactions and provides them with a new sense of fairness.”

Kanngiesser on children’s application of the merit principle

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Text #9

Kanngiesser, P., & Warneken, F. (2012). Young Children Consider Merit when Sharing Resources with Others. PLoS ONE, 7(8).

This is a great paper. It tackles the classic problem of merit as a principle of fairness (or of distributive justice): rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task.

Kanngiesser and Warneken did two studies about children’s application of the merit principle. They made children play against a puppet at a game of collecting (“fishing”) coins that were later exchanged for rewards. They varied the work-contribution of both partners by manipulating how many coins each partner collected. Three- and five-year-olds kept, on average, significantly more stickers for themselves in the more-work condition than in the less-work condition. Children, in other words, 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. Therefore, it seems that three- and five year- old children already use merit to share resources with others, even when sharing is costly for the child.

Although this appears to show that children take merit into account to calibrate their responses, it should also be noted that children almost never give away more than half of the stickers when the partner had worked more. “Even though children were clearly able to consider different work contributions, this tendency was constrained by a self-serving bias.” Thus, merit-based sharing is also mixed with or calibrated by the egotistic, self-serving bias documented by Rochat and many others.

The paper also presents a similar, second study, that shows that children’s sharing behavior is not just determined by their own absolute work-effort. Rather, children appear to take into account their own and their partner’s relative contributions when allocating resources. (Therefore, there  is some kind of elemental proportional or relational thinking here). “Young children can use comparisons between work-contribution to allocate resources.”

Warneken & Tomasello – Emergence of contingent reciprocity in young children

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Paper #7

Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2013). The emergence of contingent reciprocity in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 116(2), 338–350.

This is another crucial study by Tomasello and his team. The researchers designed games to be played individually by the toddlers participating in the study. The child and the researcher would play in parallel, side by side. At some point the child would need more resources to continue playing and these would have to be provided by the researcher; later the researcher would lack resources and the child would have the opportunity to either help the researcher or defect. As the authors put it: “we gave 2- and 3-year-old children the opportunity to either help or share with a partner after that partner either had or had not previously helped or shared with the children. Previous helping did not influence children’s helping. In contrast, previous sharing by the partner led to greater sharing in 3-year-olds but not in 2-year-olds.”

These results do not support theories claiming either that reciprocity is fundamental to the origins of children’s prosocial behavior or that it is irrelevant. Instead, they support an account in which children’s prosocial behavior emerges spontaneously but is later mediated by reciprocity.

It is not until 3.5 years of age that children modulate their sharing contingent on the partner’s antecedent behavior. Children first develop prosocial tendencies (already present in babies or young toddlers) and later those tendencies become mediated by reciprocal strategies. Helping and sharing emerge before children begin to worry about direct reciprocity. Later in development, they seem to become more sensitive to reciprocity, adjusting their prosocial behavior accordingly.

Dialogue of the deaf

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Dialogue of the deaf

I had a stimulating discussion with a neuroscientist the other day. I tried to explain to her that my interest in children’s cognitive development is linked to my interest in epistemology, that is, to what I refer to in this blog as the normativity of thought.

For example, I argue that researchers who try to explain children’s knowledge of math from a nativist point of view, can only explain the starting point of cognitive development. The starting point is innate mathematical knowledge, which is mostly implicit, and basically consists in an ability to identify the numerosity of collections of objects found in the outside world. In other words: researchers have shown that animals (humans included) have the innate ability to assess the size of a collection of perceived objects (for example, they can notice that a collection of 15 pebbles is greater than a collection of 10 pebbles). They can also discriminate among exact quantities, but only when dealing with small sets (two, three, and perhaps four objects). Also, some animals and human babies can perform elementary arithmetic operations on small sets (adding two plus one, subtracting one from two, etc.) I am referring here to studies by Dehaene (2011), Izard, Sann, Spelke, & Streri (2009), Spelke (2011), and many others.

This basic capacity is certainly different from fully-fledged “human math.” The latter involves, at the very least, the symbolic representation of exact numbers larger than three. We (humans) can represent an exact number by saying its name (“nine”), or by using a gesture that stands for the number in question (depending on the culture, this might be done by touching a part of one’s body, showing a number of fingers, etc. – see Saxe ( 1991) and also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures). And, of course, we can write down a sign that represents the number (for example, with using the Arabic numeral “9”).

Scholars agree on the fact that advanced math is explicit and symbolic, and that it builds on (and uses similar brain areas to) its precursor, innate math. Once they operate on the symbolic level, humans can do things like: performing operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and others), demonstrating mathematical propositions, proving that one particular solution to a mathematical problem is the correct one, etc. To sum up: our symbolic capacities allow us to re-describe our intuitive approach to math on a precise, normative, epistemic level.

Now, here’s when it gets tricky. I argue that the application of algorithms on the symbolic level is not merely mechanical. Humans are not computers applying rules from a rule book, one after the other (like Searle in his Chinese room). Rather, as Dehaene (2011) argues, numbers mean something for us. “Nine” means nine of something (anything). “Nine plus one” means performing the action of adding one more unit to the set of nine units. There is a core of meaning in innate math; and this core is expanded and refined in our more advanced, symbolic math.

When executing mathematical operations (either in a purely mental fashion, or supported by objects) one gets a feeling of satisfaction when one arrives to a right (fair, correct, just) result. Notice the normative language we apply here (fair, correct, right, true, just). We actually experience something similar to a sense of justice when both sides of an equation are equal, or when we arrive to a result that is necessarily correct. (Note to myself: talk to Mariano S. We might perhaps do brain fMRIs and study if the areas of the brain that get activated by the “sense of justice” in legal situations, also light up when the “sense of justice” is reached by finding the right responses in math. If a similar region gets activated, that might suggest that there is a normative aspect to math that corresponds to the normative aspect of morality).

For me, then, the million dollar question is: how do humans go from the implicit, non-symbolic, automatic level to the explicit, symbolic, intentional and normative level? What is involved in this transition? What kind of biological processes, social experiences and individual constructions are necessary to achieve the “higher,” explicit level? (These are interesting questions both for the field of math and for the field of morality). And my hypothesis is that this transition necessarily demands the intervention of a particular type of social experience, namely, the experience of the normative world of social exchanges and rules of ownership (I’ve talked a little about such reckless hypotheses in other posts of this blog).

Now, when I try to explain all this to the neuroscientist, I lose her. She doesn’t follow me. For her, human knowledge is the sum of a) innate knowledge and b) learning from the environment. Learning is the process by which our brain acquires new information from the world, information that was not pre-wired, that didn’t came ready to use “out of the box.” Whether such learning involves a direct exposure to certain stimuli that represent contents (a school teacher teaching math to his or her students) or a more indirect process of exposure to social interactions is not an interesting question for her. It doesn’t change her basic view according to which there are two things, and two things only: innate knowledge and acquired knowledge. What we know is the result of combining the two. And this is the case both for humans and for other animals. Period.

Something similar happens when I talk to her about the difference between “cold processing” and “hot processing.” We were discussing the research I am conducting right now. I interview children about ownership and stealing. In my interview design, children watch a movie where one character steals a bar of chocolate from another, and eats it. The interviewer then asks the child a series of questions aimed at understanding her reasoning about ownership and theft. Now, the movie presents a third person situation. This means that the child might be interested in the movie, but he or she is not really affected by it. Children reason about what they see in the movie, and sometimes they seem to say what they think it’s the appropriate thing to say, echoing adults’ discourse. Because, after all, the movie is fiction, not the real world.

I believe that normativity emerges not from absorbing social information that comes from external events (watching movies, attending to teachers’ explanations) but from children’s real immersion in first person, real world, conflictive situations. When a child is fighting against another for the possession of a toy, there are cries and sometimes there even is physical violence. These encounters end up in different ways; sometimes children work out a rule for sharing the scarce resource, sometimes they just fight, and sometimes an adult intervenes and adjudicates in the conflict. The child’s reactions during these events is not dictated by cold reasoning but by deeper impulses. It is in these situations where we should look for the emergence of our basic normative categories, such as reciprocity (both social and logical, or “reversibility”), ownership (or the relationship between substance and its “properties”), quantity (used to implement equity and equality), etc.

But, again, my biologist friend does not feel that the distinction between the impulsive, intense, hot reactions we experience when involved in real conflicts and the kind of third person reasoning that is triggered by movies and artificial stimuli is an important one. In both cases, she argues, it’s the same cognitive system that is at work. What we think about third person characters is probably similar to how we reason about ourselves (thanks to our capacity for empathy, our mirror-neurons, etc.)

I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong here.

 

Dehaene, S. (2011). The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Revised and Updated Edition. The number sense How the mind creates mathematics rev and updated ed (p. 352). Oxford University Press, USA. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199753873

Izard, V., Sann, C., Spelke, E. S., & Streri, A. (2009). Newborn infants perceive abstract numbers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 106(25), 10382–10385.

Saxe, G. B. (1991). Culture and Cognitive Development: Studies in Mathematical Understanding. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Spelke, E. S. (2011). Quinian bootstrapping or Fodorian combination? Core and constructed knowledge of number. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(3), 149–150.

 

On Bloom’s “The Moral Life of Babies”

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Very nice piece by Harold Bloom in the popular press (NYTimes), where he summarizes recent cognitivist-nativist research on morality. He claims, for instance that:

“A growing body of evidence (…) suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.”

Throughout the article he tries to present a moderate position that recognizes cultural variation in moral codes and the necessity of social experience for moral development, but claims that there is an innate core of morality, a cognitive starting point shared by all humanity. This innate aspect constitutes a basic moral sense (in a sense similar to which Stan Dehaene talks about the number sense). So, for instance, he acknowledges the relevance of the convincing studies by Joseph Henrich (this one, among others) yet asserts that those cultural codes are built upon the firm base of our innate capacity for feeling empathy, compassion, and for distinguishing aggressive (“evil”) agents from cooperative ones.

Thus, when commenting on Tomasello’s research that seems to imply an innate capacity for cooperation, he argues:

“Is any of the above behavior recognizable as moral conduct? Not obviously so. Moral ideas seem to involve much more than mere compassion. Morality, for instance, is closely related to notions of praise and blame: we want to reward what we see as good and punish what we see as bad. Morality is also closely connected to the ideal of impartiality — if it’s immoral for you to do something to me, then, all else being equal, it is immoral for me to do the same thing to you. In addition, moral principles are different from other types of rules or laws: they cannot, for instance, be overruled solely by virtue of authority. (Even a 4-year-old knows not only that unprovoked hitting is wrong but also that it would continue to be wrong even if a teacher said that it was O.K.) And we tend to associate morality with the possibility of free and rational choice; people choose to do good or evil. To hold someone responsible for an act means that we believe that he could have chosen to act otherwise.”

To present morality as a list of features, however, does not help us understand what is distinctive about morality in opposition to innate cognitions: its normative nature. So, when Bloom asserts that “the morality of contemporary humans really does outstrip what evolution could possibly have endowed us with” I couldn’t agree more (and I am happy to notice that a nativist like Bloom has the intellectual courage to make this point); but his very theoretical framework doesn’t help him to clarify in exactly what way cultural morality is different from a biological tendency to process information in a certain way.

“The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology (…) A fully developed morality is the product of cultural development.” Yes, I agree. But: what is culture? How does exactly culture build the normative, universal, deontic discourse that we call morality on top of our innate capacities? That is the question.

Summary of my presentation at the fairness conference

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I like the summary Erin Robbins and Philippe Rochat wrote for my presentation at the Fairness Conference (Emory University, 2012). It really captures the spirit of what I was trying to convey. It goes as follows:

Gustavo Faigenbaum from the University Autonoma de Entre Rios in Argentina (“Three Dimensions of Fairness”), in contrast to the preceding two evolutionary perspectives, argues that in understanding fairness, individual morality has been overrated and institutions underrated. To this end, Faigenbaum advances several claims that draw from both psychological and philosophical theories. First, he argues that institutional experience shapes concepts of fairness. This is evident in children’s interactions in schoolyards, where they engage in associative reciprocity (sharing with others to build alliances and demonstrate social affinities) rather than strict reciprocity. At the level of adult behavior, this associative reciprocity is also evident in gift-giving rituals. Second, Faigenbaum argues that possession and ownership are the most important institutions in the development of fairness reasoning because they involve abstraction and are the first step in the development of a deontological perspective.

Concepts of morality do not need to be evoked; he argues that research on children’s protests of ownership violations reflect an emphasis on conventional rather than moral rules. Faigenbaum concludes by arguing that participation in rule-governed activities is sufficient to create mutual understandings about what constitutes fair exchange (per philosopher John Searle’s “X counts as Y” rule). Developmental research demonstrates that fairness is an autonomous domain of experience that is fundamentally tied to institutions and cannot be reduced to moral reasoning proper.

The complete presentation is available at youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZcLicg_Dw8) yet the sound is terrible and it’s practically impossible to listen to.