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  • 2014

  • Shaw, Alex. (2014): Fairness: What it is, what it isn't, and what it might be for.. Yale U., US. Online verfügbar unter http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3571929, zuletzt geprüft am 24.02.2018

     

    Abstract: From Capitol Hill to the schoolyard, fairness is an important concern in human interactions. Although adults and children clearly act selfishly and show favoritism toward the people they like, they also care about fairness—they prefer for resources to be distributed equally unless there is some other reason for an unequal division such as work or need (Hook & Cook, 1979). This concern with fairness is somewhat perplexing to evolutionary theorists. If a psychological system was shaped by natural selection, then it must have solved some adaptive problem—a recurrent problem that influenced one's chance of passing on one's genes, or copies of one's genes that exist in relatives (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). What adaptive problem does fairness solve? In answering this question, it is first important to differentiate fairness from other psychological systems that may prompt people to pursue equality. Previous research tends to conflate a desire for equality with a desire to be generous and increase welfare overall. Generosity is usually directed toward those who have less, which often has the side effect of reducing inequality; but the aim of generosity is not to attain perfect equality. Would people still value fairness if it conflicted with generosity? I investigate this question in 6- to 8-yearold children: an ideal population for studying fairness since they have had experience sharing resources, but have likely not been exposed to philosophical theories of fairness. I find that children value fairness even when being fair means being ungenerous: children prefer to throw a resource away than to share unequally by giving one recipient more than another recipient. Children at this age also favor a person who shares resources equally (giving two resources to each recipient) to one who is more generous overall but shares unequally (giving two resources to one recipient and six to another), again suggesting that children at this age value fairness per se, not just generosity. I then explore some reasons why children might be fair, and suggest that part of the motivation behind children's fair behavior is a desire to socially signal to others that they are fair. That is, children are concerned with appearing fair to others rather than just being fair. Next, I present work which suggests that the desire to appear fair is really a desire to appear impartial; children will pay others unequally for equal work as long as they can use an impartial procedure to assign resources to others. Based on my work, I argue that fairness functions to promote the appearance of impartiality to others. I further argue that people are motivated to signal impartiality in order to avoid condemnation from others, who would judge them for trying to demonstrate or initiate alliances through preferential resource sharing. This theory has the potential to unite research programs on procedural and distributive fairness. It also emphasizes the delicate balance tha t people must maintain between public impartiality and private favoritism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

    Keywords: adaptive problem, age value fairness, children value fairness, delicate balance, distributive fairness, equal work, evolutionary theorists, fair behavior, human interactions, ideal population, impartial procedure, initiate alliances, natural selection, ph, Fairness, Interaktionsforschung, Pädagogische Psychologie, Verhaltensforschung
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