nothing is miserable, her sadness outweighing the extra pleasure of the child who gets two. But more to the point, it’s just wrong to establish an inequity when you don’t have to.
Things quickly get more complicated. Questions about equality and fairness are among the most pressing moral issues in the real world. For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Is it fair for the most productive people to possess more than everyone else, so long as they had equal opportunities to start with? Is it fair for a government to take money from the rich to give to the poor—and does the answer change if the goal of such redistribution is not to help the poor in a tangible sense but just to make people more equal, as in Louis C.K.’s story of breaking his other daughter’s toy?
The psychologistWilliam Damon, in a series of influential studies in the 1970s, used interviews to explore what children think about fairness. He found that they focus on equality of outcome and ignore other considerations. As an illustration, consider this snippet from one of his studies (children are being asked about an uneven division of pennies):
Experimenter: Do you think anyone should get more than anyone else?
Anita (seven years, four months): No, because it’s not fair. Somebody has thirty-five cents and somebody has one penny. That’s not fair.
Experimenter: Clara said she made more things than everybody else and she should get more money.
Anita: No. She shouldn’t because it’s not fair for herto get more money, like a dollar, and they get only about one cent.
Experimenter: Should she get a little more?
Anita: No. People should get the same amount of money because it’s not fair.
You seethe same equality bias in younger children. The psychologists Kristina Olson and Elizabeth Spelke asked three-year-olds to help a doll allocate resources (such as stickers and candy bars) between two characters who were said to be related to the doll in different ways: sometimes they were a sibling and a friend to the doll; at other times, a sibling and a stranger, or a friend and a stranger. Olson and Spelke found that when the three-year-olds received an even number of resources to distribute, they almost always wanted the doll to give the same amount to the two characters, regardless of who they were.
The equality bias is strong. Olson and another researcher, Alex Shaw, told children between the ages of six and eight a story about “Mark” and “Dan,” who had cleaned up their room and were to be rewarded with erasers: “I don’t know how many erasers to give them; can you help me with that? Great. You get to decide how many erasers Mark and Dan will get. We have these five erasers. We have one for Mark, one for Dan, one for Mark, and one for Dan. Uh oh! We have one left over.”
When researchers asked, “Should I give [the leftover eraser] to Dan or should I throw it away?” the children almost always wanted to throw it away. The same finding heldwhen researchers emphasized that neither Mark nor Dan would know about the extra eraser, so there could be no gloating or envy. Even here, the children wanted equality so much that they would destroy something in order to get it.
I wonder if adults would do the same. Imagine being given five one-hundred-dollar bills, to be placed into two envelopes, with each envelope to be sent to a different person. There’s no way to make things equal, but still, would you really put the fifth bill into a shredder? The children in the Shaw and Olson studies seem to care about equality a little bit too much, and one might wonder if this single-minded focus was due to their experiences outside the home. After all, the preschools and day cares where American psychologists get most of their subjects are typically institutions in which norms of equality
Things quickly get more complicated. Questions about equality and fairness are among the most pressing moral issues in the real world. For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Is it fair for the most productive people to possess more than everyone else, so long as they had equal opportunities to start with? Is it fair for a government to take money from the rich to give to the poor—and does the answer change if the goal of such redistribution is not to help the poor in a tangible sense but just to make people more equal, as in Louis C.K.’s story of breaking his other daughter’s toy?
The psychologistWilliam Damon, in a series of influential studies in the 1970s, used interviews to explore what children think about fairness. He found that they focus on equality of outcome and ignore other considerations. As an illustration, consider this snippet from one of his studies (children are being asked about an uneven division of pennies):
Experimenter: Do you think anyone should get more than anyone else?
Anita (seven years, four months): No, because it’s not fair. Somebody has thirty-five cents and somebody has one penny. That’s not fair.
Experimenter: Clara said she made more things than everybody else and she should get more money.
Anita: No. She shouldn’t because it’s not fair for herto get more money, like a dollar, and they get only about one cent.
Experimenter: Should she get a little more?
Anita: No. People should get the same amount of money because it’s not fair.
You seethe same equality bias in younger children. The psychologists Kristina Olson and Elizabeth Spelke asked three-year-olds to help a doll allocate resources (such as stickers and candy bars) between two characters who were said to be related to the doll in different ways: sometimes they were a sibling and a friend to the doll; at other times, a sibling and a stranger, or a friend and a stranger. Olson and Spelke found that when the three-year-olds received an even number of resources to distribute, they almost always wanted the doll to give the same amount to the two characters, regardless of who they were.
The equality bias is strong. Olson and another researcher, Alex Shaw, told children between the ages of six and eight a story about “Mark” and “Dan,” who had cleaned up their room and were to be rewarded with erasers: “I don’t know how many erasers to give them; can you help me with that? Great. You get to decide how many erasers Mark and Dan will get. We have these five erasers. We have one for Mark, one for Dan, one for Mark, and one for Dan. Uh oh! We have one left over.”
When researchers asked, “Should I give [the leftover eraser] to Dan or should I throw it away?” the children almost always wanted to throw it away. The same finding heldwhen researchers emphasized that neither Mark nor Dan would know about the extra eraser, so there could be no gloating or envy. Even here, the children wanted equality so much that they would destroy something in order to get it.
I wonder if adults would do the same. Imagine being given five one-hundred-dollar bills, to be placed into two envelopes, with each envelope to be sent to a different person. There’s no way to make things equal, but still, would you really put the fifth bill into a shredder? The children in the Shaw and Olson studies seem to care about equality a little bit too much, and one might wonder if this single-minded focus was due to their experiences outside the home. After all, the preschools and day cares where American psychologists get most of their subjects are typically institutions in which norms of equality
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