Fairness expectations (Schmidt/Sommerville)

For Marco F. H. Schmidt and Jessica A. Sommerville, fairness expectations mean that children as young as 15 months expect a third party to distribute goods equally. They look longer at an unequal distribution – and those who show this expectation are more likely to give their own favourite toy to a stranger. Fairness and sharing are linked from the very beginning.

This entry deals with this one study and what it means for our picture of the human being, not with the complete work of the two researchers. For background, see prosocial nature of human beings and altruism.

About the researchers. Marco F. H. Schmidt and Jessica A. Sommerville are developmental psychologists. At the time of the study, Schmidt was doing research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where Michael Tomasello worked, and at the University of Washington in Seattle, where Sommerville conducted the study with him. Sommerville now teaches at the University of Toronto.

What did Schmidt and Sommerville investigate?

47 children aged 15 months watched short films: an adult distributed crackers or milk to two others – once equally, once unequally. The children looked at the unequal outcome considerably longer. According to the method of violation of expectation, this means: they had expected an equal distribution and were surprised when it did not occur.

A simple sharing task followed. Each child chose a favourite from two toys, and an unfamiliar adult asked for one of them. About a third gave their own favourite toy, a little over a third gave the other one, and a third gave nothing at all. Many in the last group showed signs of shyness towards the stranger – the wariness of strangers typical at this age.

What is the actual finding?

The link between the two. Of the children who gave away their favourite toy, 92 per cent had previously expected the fair distribution. Among the children who gave only the less-loved toy, it was the other way round: 86 per cent of them looked longer at the fair distribution. The authors conclude that children at 15 months possess “the rudiments of a sense of fairness” and that this sense already goes hand in hand with generous sharing at this age.

Those who show their own fairness with a toy also pay attention to fairness in others – morality does not begin as a rule imposed from outside, but as an expectation the child brings along itself.

How well is this confirmed?

Well, as far as its direction goes. Other laboratories have found early fairness expectations in children aged 12 to 21 months (Geraci & Surian 2011; Sloane, Baillargeon & Premack 2012). The same research group replicated the link with sharing the favourite toy in 2013 (Sommerville et al. 2013) and showed in 150 children that the expectation forms between the sixth and fifteenth month – shaped by the children’s own experience, for instance with siblings and with their own sharing (Ziv & Sommerville 2017).

Two limitations belong to the picture. A meta-analysis of the early evaluation of helpful and hindering figures does find an effect, but considers the published values probably overestimated (Margoni & Surian 2018). And a large replication of the fairness experiment in many laboratories at once does not yet exist. The 2011 study is a strong indication, not a conclusive proof.

What does this have to do with Nowak’s five rules?

Schmidt and Sommerville place their finding within the explanations evolutionary theory gives for cooperation. Martin Nowak summarised these explanations in 2006 as five rules: kin selection, direct, indirect and network reciprocity, and group selection. The two authors refer in particular to indirect reciprocity – reciprocity mediated by reputation – because it is closely bound up with morality and social norms. The five rules themselves are Nowak’s, not theirs; more on this under reciprocity.

Is morality just a thin layer?

That is the question behind the finding. For a long time, parts of science held the assumption that human beings are selfish at their core and that morality is only a veneer laid over it by upbringing and society. Frans de Waal coined the name veneer theory for this and criticised it as a mistake (veneer theory (de Waal)).

This assumption liked to invoke two names. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), describes “a condition of Warre of every one against every one” – as a state without a common order, not as a verdict on human nature: in saying so, he writes, he does not accuse the nature of man. In 1888, Thomas Henry Huxley calls nature neither moral nor immoral but “non-moral”; from the moralist’s point of view, the animal world resembles a gladiators’ show, and only society pursues a moral aim. In Huxley, then, morality stands against nature. It is precisely this idea that the findings in young children refute: fairness and helpfulness appear before upbringing could teach them (cf. Warneken & Tomasello 2006; shared intentionality).

Our reading: human beings come into the world with a prosocial disposition

We see ourselves, with de Waal, on the side of the findings: morality is not a veneer over a selfish nature but grows out of it. D. Harald Alke put this as a rule for life in Mental Basics (1991): “Start from the assumption that human beings are good by nature.”

From this follows a critique of teaching. Where education presupposes that human beings are selfish by nature, it misses the evidence – and may produce what it believes it is describing. A well-known finding points in this direction: economics students, who learn the model of the self-interested human being, cooperate less than others in game experiments (Frank, Gilovich & Regan 1993); how much of this is learning and how much self-selection is disputed. For us, the image of the self-interested human being belongs to an order that seeks to replace the dispersed knowledge of the many with planning – the knowledge problem described by Friedrich August von Hayek. Where the natural order is respected and the power of the few remains limited to what is necessary, this image of humanity is not needed.

Does learning begin before birth?

Part of it, yes. Newborns recognise a story that was read aloud to them before birth (DeCasper & Spence 1986), and flavours from pregnancy shape later preferences (Mennella, Jagnow & Beauchamp 2001). Learning, then, does not begin only with birth. Whether a child already perceives social differences before birth, however, is an open question; we consider it possible, but not proven.

What we read differently in 2017

In Ausgewählte Perspektiven des Altruismus (Selected Perspectives on Altruism, 2017), we attributed the five mechanisms of cooperation to Schmidt and Sommerville – they come from Nowak. We also read that the children’s behaviour did not depend on their attention, and we understood the “physical” aspects to which the less generous children paid attention as material goods. The original says otherwise: looking time is the measure of attention, and by “physical” the authors mean the movements in the film scene. Our conclusion stands, but it now rests on the correct finding.

Related terms

• Prosocial nature of human beings – why human beings are fundamentally disposed to help
• Veneer theory (de Waal) – whether morality is merely a thin varnish
• Shared intentionality (Tomasello) – how children help of their own accord
• Reciprocity – mutuality and Nowak’s five rules
• Helping behaviour (Bierhoff) – when people help and what holds them back
• Altruism – the term and its interpretations

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By Tobias O. R. Alke