Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance

Abstract

Fairness considerations fundamentally affect human behavior, but our understanding of the nature and development of people's fairness preferences is limited. The dictator game has been the standard experimental design for studying fairness preferences, but it only captures a situation where there is broad agreement that fairness requires equal split. In real life, people often disagree on what is fair, largely because they disagree on whether individual achievements, luck, and efficiency considerations of what maximizes total benefits, can justify inequalities. We modified the dictator game to capture these elements, and studied how inequality acceptance develops in adolescence. We found as children enter adolescence, they increasingly viewed inequalities reflecting differences in individual achievements, but not luck, fair, whereas efficiency considerations mainly played a role in late adolescence.JEL code: D63It is well documented that adult humans are motivated by fairness considerations and are willing to sacrifice personal gains in order to eliminate inequalities they view as unfair (Fehr and Falk, 2002;Camerer, 2003). It is also evident from the political debate, surveys (Schokkaert and Devooght, 2003;Gaertner and Schwettmann, 2007), and economic experiments (Konow, 2000;Frohlich et al., 2004;Cappelen et al., 2007) that most adults view some inequalities as fair. In particular, most adults believe that differences in individual achievements (Konow, 2000;Cherry et al., 2002;Frohlich et al., 2004;Cappelen et al., 2007) and efficiency considerations of what maximizes total benefits (Van Lange, 1999;Andreoni and Miller, 2002;Fisman et al., 2007) may justify an unequal distribution 1 of income, but disagree on whether inequalities reflecting luck are fair (Cappelen et al., 2010(Cappelen et al., , 2007.To illustrate how efficiency and individual achievements may justify an unequal distribution of resources, consider two children, Anne and Carla, who discuss how to divide a cake. Anne appeals to efficiency when she argues that total benefits are maximized by giving her the largest share because she enjoys cake the most. Carla appeals to individual achievements when she argues that she should get the largest share because her contribution to making the cake was largest. The legitimacy of these, and other, fairness considerations have been extensively discussed in the philosophical literature (Rawls, 1971;Nozick, 1974;Sen, 2009), and such considerations are important for how people make decisions in a wide range of situations (Montada, 2002). For example, in the workplace, some may find it fair that a more productive colleague has a higher wage, and, in allocating public funds, some may find it fair to pay some attention to which projects produce the greatest total benefits in the population.Disagreements over questions of fair distribution are fundamental in human life and to get a better understanding of the source of such disagreements it is important to study how fairness views develop in childhood (Moo...

Social preferences during childhood and the role of gender and age — An experiment in Austria and Sweden

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Fairness in Winner-Take-All Markets.

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Using Factorial Surveys to Study Justice Perceptions: Five Methodological Problems of Attitudinal Justice Research

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