Envy emerges out of our sense of fairness, fueled by competition. It is part and parcel ofa

Envy emerges out of our sense of fairness, fueled by competition. It is part and parcel ofa hierarchical society. When we envy someone, we have detected a difference or inequity between our own condition and that of another. We want what someone else has, presumably because we like what they have. Wanting and liking are in harmony. Recognition of the inequity fuels competition to redress the imbalance. This sense of fairness appears early in child development, changing in systematic ways as a function of a culture’s norms. The Swiss economist Ernst Fehr, who led the brain imaging studies of punishment and reward discussed in Chapter 1, assembled a team of developmental psychologists to test for evidence of fairness in young children ages 3-8 years old. Fehr was especially interested in when children recognize a disparity or inequity in the distribution of resources, and what they are willing to do, if anything, to redress the imbalance. The experimenter paired up each child with a partner of the same age who was either from the same school or a different school; the school distinction was set up to look at in-group versus out-group differences which, as discussed in chapter 1, can lead parochial altruism — the paradoxical result of greater cooperation among group members and greater hatred and violence toward those outside. Though each child knew about their partner’s age and school affiliation, they never saw their partner. Each child therefore knew only that they were playing with someone from their school or someone unfamiliar to them. Each child played three different games. In each game, the experimenter told one child to decide how to distribute a fixed amount of candy. In the prosocial game, the decider either takes one candy and gives one to the partner or takes one candy and gives nothing to the partner. If children are sensitive to inequities and want to share in order to make things fair, they should pick the 1-1 option; picking the 1-0 option doesn’t affect the decider, but dings the partner. In the envy game, the decider has a choice between 1-1 and 1-2. As in the prosocial game, the decider gets the same amount of candy with both options, but preserves equity with 1-1. Picking 1-1 also reveals that the child has an aversion to others having more, even when there is no personal cost. In the third, sharing game, the decider has a choice between 1-1] and 2-0. Here again, the decider gets candy in both cases, but the 2-0 option tempts the desire for more, both personally and relatively. On the one hand, a greedy child will want more candy, and so 2 wins over 1. But picking the 2-0 option also leads to a greater difference with the partner, while robbing them of an opportunity for any candy. If fairness prevails, deciders should pick 1-1. If selfishness prevails, motivated by competition, they should pick 2-0. Across all three games, there was an increasing tendency from age 3 to 8 years old for children to pick the fair distribution (1-1). Across all ages and games, children were most likely to pick the fair distribution when playing against familiar than unfamiliar schoolmates. What these results reveal, together with many other similar studies, is that children are sensitive to the distribution of goods at an Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 70 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012816