Inequity Aversion in a Vulnerable Sample of Argentine Children

BELÉN MESURADO; PAULINA GUERRA; MARIA CRISTINA RICHAUD DE MINZI

Minneapolis

Congreso; 2018 Biennial Meeting. Society for Research on Adolescence; 2018

Society for Research on Adolescence

Equity is the proportional distribution of resources between the members of a group, when it is assumed that everyone contributed equally (LoBue, Nishida, Chiong, DeLoache, &Haidt, 2009). When this distribution is not proportional, inequity aversion may emerge which is the resistance to this unequal distribution. We can distinguish two types of inequity aversion, when the person receives more than the others it is called advantage inequity aversion (AI), and when the person receives less than the others it is a disadvantage inequity aversion (DI). Previews research have found that DI emerges earlier than AI during child development, but the emergence of AI would not happen in all cultures at the same time (Blake, McAuliffe, Corbit, Callaghan, Barry, Bowie, Wrangham 2015).The objective of this presentation is to study the inequity aversion in advantage and disadvantage conditions in a vulnerable sample of Argentine children between 5 and 10 years old. These preliminary results showed no differences in the inequity aversion between kids of 5 and 7 years old (Friedman´s test = 2, p = .37), but showed more disadvantage inequity aversion than advantage inequity aversion in kids between 8 and 10 years old (Friedman´s test = 6.5, p < 0.05). These preliminary results show that disadvantageous inequity aversion emerges at the age of 8 in this argentine sample, and that AI does not appear during this period studied. These results support the thesis that AI and DI have different trajectories of development in human ontogeny (McAuliffe, Blake, Steinbeis, & Warneken 2017). On the other side, previews studies have shown that the early emergence of DI, around 4-5 years old, is a quite extended phenomenon in many cultures (Blake et al. 2015), however findings of this sample show a later development of DI. These may be related to the specifics characteristic of this population, where the social vulnerability may attempt to the normal development of the child. However a bigger sample is needed to make more conclusive statements.