Is your workplace fair? Studies suggest that perceived unfairness at work puts you at higher risk for developing a variety of health problems – including high blood pressure, diabetes, and depression. It might even contribute to heart attacks.
That probably makes sense to most people. And yet I wonder: How often do we think about the health costs of unfairness imposed on children?
Different cultures have different ideas about fairness. Should everybody have the same rights and reap the same benefits? Or should we grant more based on merit? Or age? Or ability? Or need?
The answers vary from place to place. But regardless of the way local cultures tweak the concept, everybody cares about fairness. And as I’ve noted before, studies suggest that children are sensitive to fairness from a very early age. At just fifteen months, babies in Germany have shown surprise when people aren’t given equal portions of a treat.
Even more impressive, I think, are the subtle expectations shown by older babies. In an experiment on 21-month-old American toddlers, Stephanie Sloane and her colleagues had children watch a staged drama – two adults being told by a friendly authority that it was “time to clean up” a pile of toys on the floor.
What babies saw next varied. In some cases, babies watched both adults do the work. In others, babies saw only one adult work while the other played.
When the task was complete, the authority figure offered rewards. What did the babies think about it? When babies saw both adults get rewarded, they weren’t surprised. Not if both adults had worked. But if only one person had done all the work, the babies seemed puzzled.
And here’s the really interesting part: The babies showed this puzzlement only when the authority figure could see who had worked and who had not. When it seemed clear that the authority lacked this information, the babies were unsurprised that both parties got equal rewards.
So not only do babies have expectations about fairness, they have expectations about how adults judge fairness. And you probably don’t need studies to convince you that older kids care about fairness. Getting back to my initial question, how might kids’ feelings about fairness affect their health?
Several studies offer some answers. A huge, international survey asked kids living in 21 different European and North American countries about life at school. Kids who perceived their teachers to be unfair were more likely to report frequent headaches.
Another large study of adolescents in Italy found that kids who complained of institutionalized unfairness at school were more likely to suffer from psychosomatic illness.
There is also evidence that whole families suffer when parents seem to single out one child for negative treatment. In a study of 400 Canadian families, researchers found that everybody in this situation – even the favored siblings – experienced more mental health problems.
And there is evidence regarding racism. Studies of children have consistently reported links between a child’s perception of racism and her risk of mental health problems and metabolic disease.
Results like these suggest that children’s perceptions of unfairness can be really stressful — stressful enough to trigger immediate physical and emotional symptoms. Can childhood perceptions of unfairness lead to long-term health problems? I haven’t seen any studies that address this specific question, but it doesn’t seem far-fetched. Not if you remember that perceived unfairness in the workplace is linked with long-term health problems in adults.
And what about the effects on behavior? It isn’t hard to imagine how living with feelings of unfairness might shape the way a child behaves. In Norway, researchers have reported that perceptions of teacher fairness play an important role in students’ academic motivation. And as I’ve written in an earlier post, experiments suggest that young children act more impulsively in settings where fairness isn’t enforced.
So there’s good reason to be concerned – not for kids who experience occasional encounters with unfairness, but for the kids who are coping with chronic injustice – at school, at home, or in the wider world. And should keep in mind that it’s the perception of unfairness that matters. Maybe some kids aren’t as unreasonably oppressed as they think they are. If so, they need to understand the rationales for the decisions adults make. They need to hear explanations, and be given the opportunity to talk about the status quo.
image of Justice by Ralf Lotys / wikimedia commons