Young Children Negatively Evaluate and Sanction Free-riders, Even Absorbing Costs to Punish Further

Yang, Fan, You-jung Choi, Antonia Misch, Xin Yang, and Yarrow Dunham 2018. “In Defense of the Commons: Young Children Negatively Evaluate and Sanction Free-riders”. PsyArXiv. April 18. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/XMQK8

Abstract: Human flourishing depends on individuals paying costs to contribute to common goods, but such arrangements are vulnerable to “free-riding”, in which individuals benefit from others’ contributions without paying costs themselves. Systems of tracking and sanctioning free-riders can stabilize cooperation, but the origin of such tendencies is not well understood. Here, we provide evidence that children as young as four negatively evaluate and sanction free-riders. Across six studies we show that these tendencies are robust, large in magnitude, tuned to intentional rather than unintentional non-contribution, and generally consistent across third- and first-party cases. Further, these effects cannot be accounted for by factors that frequently co-occur with free-riding, such as the costs that free-riding imposes on the group or that free-riding is often non-conformity. Our findings demonstrate that from early in life children both hold and enforce a normative expectation that individuals are intrinsically obligated to contribute to the common good.

---
An evolved psychological mechanism for detecting and deterring free-riders has been suggested as a potentially important contributor to the stability of cooperation in multi-party settings, and adults’ spontaneous detection and negative evaluation of free-riders is consistent with this possibility [...]. But adults have extensive experience with institutional and other societal sanctions directed at free-riders, raising an alternative explanation: sanctioning free-riders is a learned norm. While our results do not settle this issue, they show that the tendency to sanction free-riders emerges several years prior to formal schooling, when children are not yet expected to be regular contributors and are unlikely to be sanctioned for failing to contribute themselves. Indeed, for at least two reasons our results are challenging for straightforward socialization accounts. First, in an aggregated analysis for all cases of intentional free-riding (drawn from studies 1-5), we observed greater negativity towards free-riders in younger children, a pattern inconsistent with gradual norm internalization. Second, the developmental patterns observed here appear to emerge earlier than other forms of norm enforcement. For example, compared to free-riding, unfairness in dyadic interactions presumably occurs more frequently in children’s life and thus should be a more direct targetfor socialization.

However, if not directly affected, children do not sanction such violations until middle childhood (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011; McAuliffe et al., 2015). Therefore, our findings suggest that protracted social learning and extensive group experiences are not necessary for the emergence of a tendency to sanction free-riders. Our results are consistent with proposals for an evolved psychological machinery for cheater detection and sanctioning.

 h/t: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf