Inequity Aversion in a low SES Sample of Argentine Children

BELÉN MESURADO; FLORENCIA DE SANCTIS; MARÍA PAULINA GUERRA; MARÍA CRISTINA RICHAUD

Baltimore

Conferencia; 2019 SRCD Biennial Meeting; 2019

Society for Research in Child Development

Our preferences for fair distributions seem to be an extended characteristic of human beings. When people get unequal outcomes, stress levels rise in front of injustice (Austin & Walter 1974) and inequity aversion may emerge. Inequity aversion is the resistance people make to unequal distributions in order to obtain equity (Fehr & Schmidt 1999). When facing disadvantageous unequal distributions the person has two sources of negative effects: the unfairness itself and the privation of a better reward; on the other hand when people face to advantageous unequal distributions a conflict emerges inside the person because they get the positive effect of getting a good outcome, and the negative effect of being unfairly advantageous (Van den Bos 1998). Disadvantageous inequity aversion (DI) seems to be present in most cultures since 4 years old and to increase with age, advantageous inequity aversion (AI) seems to appear around 8 in WEIRD societies and to increase with age too (Bleke & colleagues 2015).METHOD To study the inequity aversion in children from 6 to 11 years old we used the ?Inequity game? (Blake & McAuliffe 2011) that consists on sitting two children face to face and make them offers of candies in two conditions. Children in condition one received an equitable and advantageous offer. Children in condition two received and equitable and a disadvantageous offer. One of the children decided to accept or reject the researcher?s offers. The sample consisted of 177 kids ranging ages from 6 to 11 years old (M = 8,55, SD = 1,6) and 96 of them were boys.RESULTSThe MANOVA repeated measures confirmed the main effects for trial type (equity- disadvantageous inequity) [Hotelling´s F (1, 84) = 22,25, p ≤. 01, eta =.21] but not for the interaction Age x Trial type [Hotelling´s F(2,84) = 1,37, p=. 26, eta =.03]. Figure 1 shows a decreasing tendency for equity rejections trough ages and a stable tendency for disadvantageous rejections. The MANOVA repeated measures indicated that there is no effect for trial type (equity- advantageous inequity) [Hotelling´s F (1,87) = 0.82, p= .37, eta =.01] but there is an effect for the interaction Age x trial type [Hotelling´s F(2,87) = 3,56, p ≤ .05, eta = .08]. Figure 2 shows a decreasing tendency for equity rejections and a increasing tendency for advantageous rejections trough age. DISCUSIONThese findings show the specific characteristic of a low SES sample of Argentine children. Results show that children do differ in the number of rejections depending on the offers made by the researcher when they are equitable or disadvantageous, rejecting more disadvantageous offers, however this behavior does not seem to increase as children get older as it was seen in other studies (Bleke & colleagues 2015). On the other hand we didn?t find statistically significant differences between advantageous and equitable offers, nevertheless we can see an increasing tendency on AI as children get older. This findings match with theory as DI seems to be an easier behavior to acquire than AI. As a limitation of our study, the sample was acquired in children of a single school and during school hours which could have influenced their decisions. Further research needs to be done with a broader sample and from other SES levels.