A pair of brown capuchin monkeys are sitting in a cage. From time to time, their caretakers give them tokens, which they can then exchange for food. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that capuchin monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers. So what happens when unfairness strikes—when, in exchange for identical tokens, one monkey gets a cucumber and the other a grape?
When Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal carried out just this experiment, in 2003, focussing on female capuchin monkeys, they found that monkeys hate being disadvantaged. A monkey in isolation is happy to eat either a grape or a slice of cucumber. But a monkey who sees that she’s received a cucumber while her partner has gotten a grape reacts with anger: she might hurl her cucumber from her cage. Some primates, Brosnan and de Waal concluded, “dislike inequity.” They hate getting the short end of the stick. Psychologists have a technical term for this reaction: they call it “disadvantageous-inequity aversion.” This instinctual aversion to getting less than others has been found in chimpanzees and dogs, and it occurs, of course, in people, in whom it seems to develop from a young age. The psychologists Alessandra Geraci and Luca Surian have found, for example, that babies as young as twelve months prefer fair-minded cartoon animals to unfair ones.
And yet, for humans, an aversion to getting less is just one aspect of unfairness. Unlike other animals, we sometimes balk at receiving more than other people. Technically speaking, we experience “advantageous-inequity aversion.” In some situations, we’ll even give up something good because it’s more than someone else is getting. In those moments, we seek to insure that the distribution of goods remains fair. We don’t want the long end of the stick, either.
It seems likely that our aversion to being disadvantaged is innate, because we share it with other animals. The question for psychologists is whether our aversion to benefitting from inequality is innate, too—or, alternatively, if it’s learned through some form of socialization. In December, the psychologists Peter Blake, Katherine McAuliffe, Felix Warneken, and their colleagues published the results of experiments designed to answer this question. Their research spanned seven nations—India, Uganda, Peru, Senegal, Mexico, Canada, and the United States—and looked at close to nine hundred children, aged four to fifteen. They examined whether advantageous-inequity aversion—A.I., as they call it—emerges in all cultures, and, if it does, whether it emerges in the same way everywhere.
Their method was relatively simple. They sat two children down at a table, each in front of an empty bowl. Above each bowl was a tray, onto which the experimenter placed candy. Often, she distributed candy unfairly: she might place four candies on one tray and only one on the other. The child being tested then faced a choice. She could pull a green handle to accept the presented candies, causing them to fall into their respective bowls—or she could pull a red handle to reject them, causing all the candies to fall into a third, off-limits bowl, in the center.
The researchers found that, all over the world, children tended to reject the candies when the split favored the other child. (That is, they rejected disadvantageous inequity, or D.I.) They also found that some, older kids would reject advantageous offers. None of that is surprising. A.I. has been documented among adults many times in the past; in one early study, from behavioral economist George Loewenstein and his colleagues, as many as sixty-six per cent of participants disliked getting more than someone else. The surprising part is that the kids only displayed A.I. in three countries: Canada, the United States, and Uganda. In the other countries—Mexico, India, Senegal, and Peru—they enjoyed the sweet taste of inequality.
These results raise some fascinating questions. Why were kids from only certain countries bothered by having an unfair advantage? And were they rejecting those unfair offers because they cared about fairness—or for some other, less obvious reason?
It’s helpful to start by stepping back from the more complicated case of A.I. to the simpler case of D.I. There are lots of reasons to object to disadvantageous inequity, and some are more obvious than others. D.I. is bad substantively, of course, because you get less candy. But it’s also bad socially, because it signals a demotion in status. In fact, when kids reject disadvantageous offers, they’re often most concerned about their social status, rather than with the candy itself, or with abstract ideas like equality. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s all about me: how do I come off in this scenario?
The importance of social hierarchy in the rejection of disadvantageous unfairness has been cleverly demonstrated in several experiments. In one study, the psychologists Mark Sheskin, Paul Bloom, and Karen Wynn had kids choose between getting one token and giving one to another child, or getting two tokens and giving three to the other kid. “You might think that the latter is the better choice because both children get more,” Bloom writes, in his book “Just Babies.” Often, though, the children chose the first option—just one token each—insuring that they wouldn’t get less than someone else.
In another version of the study, Bloom and his colleagues offered a choice between two tokens all around, or one for the subject and none for her counterpart. Five- and six-year-olds preferred the second option: that is, they gave up a reward in exchange for having more than their peers. “We have a natural aversion to getting less—not to inequity,” Bloom told me. The kids’ behavior isn’t principled; on the contrary, Bloom believes, it seems motivated by something very much like spite. And the message is clear: I want to emerge on top. The absolute number of candies matters less than my relative status.
If D.I. is really about status rather than fairness, could A.I. be about status, too? Rejecting an advantageous offer, after all, also sends a social signal. If you live in a society where ideas of fairness and equality hold a privileged position, then it becomes meaningful to show yourself as embracing those ideals, even at personal cost. Those around you might feel that, since you’re the type of person who believes in equity no matter what, you’re valuable to society, and worthy of respect. From this perspective, both D.I. and A.I. achieve the same end: making sure you maintain status. Perhaps, for older kids who are transitioning into adolescence, status doesn’t always come from having more. It could also flow from being an admirable role model.
If status really is the driving force behind both D.I. and A.I., it would explain one of the study’s relative outliers: Mexico. When the experiment was run there, very few of the children exhibited A.I.; moreover, D.I. appeared to develop far later than in other societies. The Mexican children, in other words, tended to accept all offers, however unequal in any direction. The authors point out that, in that particular sample, most of the kids already knew each other. Perhaps they had already developed reputations, and, as a result, what happened in the experiment had no real implications for their social hierarchy. They were free to enjoy the candy all by itself, without social signals on the side.
Still, even if A.I. and D.I. have a lot in common—even if they’re both about status—the research from Blake and his colleagues suggests that they are different in at least one fundamental way. D.I. is innate: all over the world, and in the animal kingdom, getting less than others is perceived as an insult. A.I., on the other hand, seems to be a product of social life or culture. Globally, at least among children, it appears to be very unevenly distributed. In Canada, the United States, and Uganda, the study shows that older kids are more likely, on average, to reject an advantageous offer than an equal offer. By contrast, in Mexico, Peru, India, and Senegal, they willingly accept getting more. In the past, studies of A.I. have focussed on so-called WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. As a result, the uneven distribution of A.I. went beneath the radar.
To explain its uneven distribution, Blake and his colleagues point to a number of potential causes. The most prominent is “Western norms.” They suggest that advantageous-equity aversion is more prevalent in Western societies because, in the West, equality and the abstract notion of “fairness” are valued as goods in their own right; it’s only within that framework that sacrificing your self-interest in the name of fairness comes to be linked with status. (In recent years, of course, Western societies have been wrestling with the problem of rising inequality—an irony on which the researchers choose not to dwell.) In an earlier study, McAuliffe, Blake, Warneken, and their colleagues found that, while subjects exhibited D.I. even in the absence of a visible partner, A.I. only emerged in social situations. This suggests that A.I. might require certain kinds of social environments to thrive.
If it’s Western culture that encourages A.I., then why is it so common in Uganda? Blake and his colleagues posit that the answer lies in the specific subset of the Ugandan population they surveyed. They recruited children from schools that had Western teachers, and in which students were frequently exposed to Western researchers. Perhaps, they write, that environment had changed the students’ sense of fairness. This reasoning seems a bit thin: aren’t other societies also exposed to Western norms, especially in the modern age of ubiquitous smartphones and mass media? “It remains possible that children in Uganda reject an advantage for other reasons not linked to Western norms,” the authors write. “If this is the case, we would expect to see A.I. emerge in children in other communities in Uganda with similar cultural norms but different institutional structures.”
Behind the question of how “Western” A.I. is, a broader question looms. What factors in society could create a norm whereby it’s valuable to establish yourself publicly as someone who doesn’t want to receive more than others? In the same set of studies in which he found that, under some circumstances, up to sixty-six per cent of adults experienced A.I., George Loewenstein tried to tease out what conditions might give rise to advantageous-inequality aversion in the first place. He started by asking subjects to imagine themselves in a specific business scenario. In the first scenario, they had invented a new type of ski with someone; in another, they were splitting tax revenue from a vacant lot with a neighbor; and, in a third, they were in conflict with a sales manager at a retail outlet. In each of these scenarios, their preëxisting relationship with their counterpart was described as positive, negative, or neutral, and the financial payments were either equal or representative of disadvantageous or advantageous inequity. As expected, when it came to D.I., pretty much no one enjoyed receiving less than the co-inventor, business partner, or manager. A.I., by contrast, was unevenly distributed; in some situations, it was absent altogether. It emerged readily in the invention and vacant-lot scenarios—if the preëxisting relationship was positive or neutral; it was relatively infrequent in the retail scenario; and, if the relationship was negative, it disappeared across the board. (In that case, people preferred to come out ahead of their counterparts.)
Based on his participants’ choices, Loewenstein divided them into three groups: saints, loyalists, and ruthless competitors. Saints preferred equality over everything else; they were concerned with fairness for its own sake. Loyalists preferred equality in positive relationships, but, in negative ones, they sought A.I.—they approached the relationship socially, seeking to create loyalty by giving up their unfair advantages. Ruthless competitors always preferred getting more. The relative percentages of the saints, loyalists, and ruthless competitors were twenty-four, twenty-seven, and thirty-six, respectively. (Eighteen per cent couldn’t be classified.) Then, in a follow-up, Loewenstein clarified the preëxisting relationships, providing his subjects with several paragraphs of explanation as to why those relationships were positive, negative, or neutral. Under that condition, the number of saints and ruthless competitors fell, while the proportion of loyalists rose to over half—fifty-two per cent.
When participants received more context for the study’s social scenarios and became more invested in their relationships, in other words, they gave up more to nourish and maintain them. And they are wise to do so. The results of another set of experiments show that the more someone earns in a context of inequality, the more hostile reactions from others she provokes. People dislike those at the top of the heap more when the heap itself is taller.
All of these findings have something to say about why we value fairness. Our ideas about fairness are relativistic, rather than absolute. In many ways, we approach fairness as a form of social signalling. People tend not to care about equality as an abstract principle; instead, they use fairness to negotiate their place in a social hierarchy. And, for that reason, we’re especially willing to give up our unfair advantages when there’s the possibility of strengthening a future relationship.
Could these general principles explain why A.I. appears earlier or more often in some societies? Possibly, but there’s a lot more research to do before anything like a clear-cut answer emerges. One thing we do know is that culture plays a role—but what kind of culture? Can it be taught? Maybe, if we can figure out the answer to that question, we’ll be able to build a world where there are more saints and loyalists—and fewer ruthless competitors.