The distribution of resources can either be equal or unequal between two or more people. In previous literature, unequal distributions have been examined from two perspectives: disadvantageous inequality and advantageous inequality. Disadvantageous inequality is defined as a situation where one person receives less resources than another person. Advantageous inequality is defined as a situation where one person receives more resources than another person. Inequality aversion is defined as a preference for equality rather than inequality in resources distribution. According to Fehr and Schmidt (1999), adults are willing to sacrifice their own rewards in order to prevent inequality both when they receive less than a partner and when they receive more than a partner.

In the literature concerning developmental psychology, the findings indicate that, opposite to adults, preschool children are willing to sacrifice their own resources in order to prevent inequality when they receive less than a partner but not when they receive more than a partner. So they show disadvantageous inequality aversion but not advantageous inequality aversion (Fehr, Bernhard & Rockenbach, 2008; LoBue, Nishida, Chiong, Deloache, & Haidt, 2011; Moore, 2009). By way of an explanation for these findings, some researchers say that preschool children do not want to be disadvantaged and want to be advantaged in social comparison processes because they feel social emotions such as envy (disadvantageous inequality) and schadenfreude (advantageous inequality) and yet they can’t regulate these social emotions well (Sheskin, Bloom, & Wynn, 2014). When they become 8-9 years old, they can regulate these social emotions and show inequality aversion for both inequality types. Some researches say that these findings don’t necessarily indicate immaturity of skills due to age, but they can be explained with the experimental conditions in the researches (Blake, Mcauliffe, & Warneken, 2014). In certain conditions, the participant child’s partner is not present or the participant child receives resources without doing any work - a windfall effect - or the child is forced to choose one of the pre-defined distributions. There are some findings that preschool children can show advantageous inequality aversion when the experimental conditions are changed. For example, it was found that when children collaborate, even if the distribution was set to create advantageous inequality by the researchers, 3-year-olds equalized themselves and their partners by giving them their extra resource(s) (Hamann, Warneken, Greenberg, & Tomasello, 2011; Warneken, Lohse, Melis, & Tomasello, 2011). It might show that collaboration is important for inequality aversion, especially for the advantageous one. Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman and Herrmann (2012) say that behaviours such as equal sharing, helping and other related skills were formed in the process of collaboration and they call it interdependence hypothesis. Thus, one of the aims of this study is to investigate the effect of collaboration on inequality aversion in line with the interdependence hypothesis. Other aims are to investigate the effects of inequality type and cost (to be willing to sacrifice one’s own resource) on inequality aversion. 

Warneken et al. (2011) suggested that the forced choice paradigm would make inequality aversion difficult because of pre-defined conditions but the present study doesn’t agree with this idea. If collaboration is a facilitator factor in inequality aversion, it may also be valid for the forced-choice paradigm. As far as is known, there is no research that has investigated the effect of collaboration using the forced choice paradigm.

Method

The participants were made up of 80 (39 male, 41 female) children aged between 50-72 months (M=62, SD=5.99) who were attending kindergartens in Istanbul. The experimental groups had 27 participants and the control group had 26 participants. The research was experimental and the experimantal groups were designed in two ways: full and half collaboration. For the collaboration element, bead and box game was used (in this game, the beads were put into boxes according to color) and for inequality aversion, a forced choice game (there were two options which included equal and unequal distributions between the child and the partner and the child was forced to choose one of these two options) was used. In these games the child’s partner was a hand puppet named “Bibo” and the rewards for the games were gender neutral stickers. Each child was tested individually.

The forced-choice game included four distributions, meaning that each one had an equal and an unequal (disadvantageous or advantageous) option. Both disadvantageous and advantageous options had cost (the child received a different number of rewards depending on whether they chose the equal or unequal option) and non-cost (the child received the same number of rewards irrespective of whether they chose the equal or unequal option) distributions (Sheskin, Bloom, & Wynn, 2014). Thus, the distributions were like “costly disadvantageous”, “non-costly disadvantageous”, “costly advantageous”, “non-costly advantageous”. Each participant child received “1” for equal options and “0” for unequal options.

Results

In the results, a 3 × 2 × 2 mixed model ANOVA with inequality type (disadvantageous, advantageous) and cost (cost, no cost) as within-subject factors and collaboration (full collaboration, half collaboration, no collaboration) as a between-subjects factor, was performed with the number of egalitarian choices as the dependent variable. Between subjects, it was observed that there was no significant main effect from collaboration, (F(2, 77) = 0.25, p = 0.78, ηp 2 = .01). Within subjects, there was a significant main effect from inequality type, (F(1, 77) = 6.18, p = .02, ηp 2 = .07) with more egalitarian decisions overall in advantageous trials (M = 1.15, SD = 0.64) compared to disadvantageous trials (M = 0.90, SD = 0.67). Within subjects, there was a significant main effect from cost, (F(1, 77) = 7.25, p = 0.01, ηp 2 = .09) with more egalitarian decisions overall in no cost trials (M = 1.19, SD = 0.71) compared to cost trials (M = 0.86, SD = 0.73). There was no interaction effect.

Discussion

Consequently, this research may add new problems to the literature with the findings that collaboration doesn’t affect inequality aversion which is inconsistent with the interdependence hypothesis. Also the findings indicate that children show advantageous inequality aversion more than disadvantageous one which is inconsistent with the idea that preschool children can’t regulate social emotions well. Furthermore, cost has an important effect on children’s equality preferences and children show more inequality aversion in nocost distributions than cost ones. This finding is not consistent with the inequality aversion model (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999) which indicates that people are willing to sacrifice their own resources to prevent inequalities. Although there are some limitations in the study, this research suggests that inequality aversion in preschoolers might not be rigid (developmentally, first disadvantageous aversion and later advantageous aversion or collaboration is essential for inequality aversion) rather, it could be a flexible behavior.