The article The Ontogeny of Fairness in Seven Societies written by P.R. Blake in Nature, is about research on different adolescents and their degree and modes of fairness. The researchers wanted to find out whether different children of different ages and backgrounds had similar or different ways of thinking when it came to what they thought was fair. To test this, they paired up children of similar age, and tested their levels of disadvantageous inequality aversion (DI) and advantageous inequality aversion (AI). DI is when you do not tolerate being exploited whereas AI is when you reject a relative advantage. Researchers hypothesized that DI would be more common in the younger children, and that AI would most likely present itself when they children became older due to social norms and maturity. Results showed that their first hypothesis of DI being more common in adolescence was true, although its development varied with the different areas that the kids came from. AI did appear more frequently in other children, but this was explained that it was due to the westernized cultures they came from. Parents in westernized cultures tend to encourage independence and so it is a possible explanation as to why these particular children reacted in that manner. Overall, they were correct when they predicted DI developing first over AI.

For this research, the topic was children’s reaction to fairness, and the question was to find the difference in their reactions based on age and background. To answer this question, the type of data needed was acts, behaviors, or events, and the data collection method was detached observation as they watched what each child did when placed in either a DI or AI situation. To analyze this data, the researchers formed their findings into ordinal data; they ranked the child’s levels of DI and AI, and at what ages/maturity they were found. These observations were then compared to those of different children.

At the end of the article, enhancements for the research were discussed which I thought was helpful. One explained how their research only studied a specific age group and that it was most likely that these traits would change throughout their own lifespan. Another was that further research could test children from a greater amount of diverse societies. Overall, I thought was a very interesting research study, and one that could be used as an example as to why children act the way they do due to their upbringings.

Blake, P. R., K. Mcauliffe, J. Corbit, T. C. Callaghan, O. Barry, A. Bowie, L. Kleutsch, K. L. Kramer, E. Ross, H. Vongsachang, R. Wrangham, and F. Warneken. “The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies.” Nature 528.7581 (2015): 258-61. Web. 17 Feb. 2017.