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Fairness and intentionality in children’s decision-making

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Abstract

Few studies have addressed the role of different aspects of the Theory of Mind (ToM) (intentionality and false belief understanding) in decision-making by adults playing strategic games where the importance of fairness is crucial. Even more interesting, this topic has been less investigated with children. The goal of this research was to explore the development of the decisional behavior along with the understanding of fairness, intentions and first- and second-order false belief understanding in children who are just acquiring those abilities. Multiple rounds of the ultimatum game with a human and a non-human partner (child/roulette wheel) were played by 177 children in the age range of 5–10 years, who also completed classic false belief tasks. Results confirm the key role of fairness sensibility across age groups and different degrees of the relevance of ToM according to the variability of children’s decisional behavior (stable vs. dynamic).

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Notes

  1. In the DG, one player (the Allocator) decides how much of an endowment to award to the second player (the Recipient). Allocations in this game measure pure altruism, in that the Proposer sacrifices personal gain to share the endowment with their partner. The UG is a variant which examines fairness and more strategic thinking in the context of two-player bargaining. In the UG, the Proposer and Responder are also asked to divide a sum of money, with the Proposer specifying how this sum should be divided between the two. However, in this case, the Responder has the option of accepting or rejecting the offer. If the offer is accepted, the sum is divided as proposed. If it is rejected, neither player receives anything. In either event the game is over, that is, there are no subsequent rounds in which to reach agreement. The decision to reject an unfair offer may be considered a form of altruistic punishment because the Responder chooses to receive no money rather than the amount offered by the Proposer, presumably to punish the Proposer for making a miserly offer. If people are motivated purely by self-interest, the Responder should accept any offer and, knowing this, the Proposer will offer the smallest non-zero amount.

  2. We are grateful to Camilla Olivero and Sara Carlin for the collection of the data on children and for their coding, and to Camilla Olivero also for the graphic drawing depicting the UG rounds.

  3. Latin square is one of the most convenient and often-used strategies to control the order effect of stimuli and/or research conditions. It consists of the creation of a matrix with a number of rows and columns equal to the number of stimuli/research conditions. No row or column includes the same stimulus/research condition twice (and therefore in the same position). (See, for example, McBurney and White 2007).

  4. To score their performance, correct answers received 1 point, and incorrect answers scored 0. The two justification questions were scored on a three-point scale: 0 points for a wrong answer (reference to wrong information or irrelevant facts, such as: “Because toys always stay in the wardrobe” or “Because I always do the same”); 1 point for a correct answer referring to the behavioral domain (for example: “Because she had put them in the wardrobe”); 2 points for a correct answer referring to the mentalistic domain (for example: “Because she does not know that he has changed the location of the toy” or “Because she thinks/believes that the toy is still in the wardrobe” as the justification for the first-order false belief question; “Because he does not know that she knows that he changed the location of the toy” or “Because he thinks/believes that she does not know that he changed the location of the toy” for the justification pf the second-order false belief question). The scores for all of the tasks could range from 0 to 8 (if all questions received 1 point) or from 0 to 10 (if both justifications received 2 points).

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the directors of the schools for granting us permission to carry out the research. We offer special thanks to parents who gave their permission for their children to participate in our research, and, last but not least, to all children who took part in our study. We would like to thank our colleagues who posed questions and gave suggestions when this research was presented at international conferences: their constructive criticism improved the quality of this work. We also would like to thank the reviewers whose comments helped us to improve the general quality of this paper. Special thanks to Matthias Sutter, who generously provided useful comments on an earlier draft of this work.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Research Unit on Theory of Mind, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

    Ilaria Castelli, Davide Massaro & Antonella Marchetti

  2. Neural Decision Science Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Alan G. Sanfey

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  1. Ilaria Castelli
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  2. Davide Massaro
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Correspondence to Ilaria Castelli.

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Castelli, I., Massaro, D., Sanfey, A.G. et al. Fairness and intentionality in children’s decision-making. Int Rev Econ 57, 269–288 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-010-0101-x

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