Reward type influences adults’ rejections of inequality in a task designed for children

In the context of economic games, adults sacrifice money to avoid unequal outcomes, showing so-called inequity aversion. Child-friendly adaptations of these games have shown that children, too, show inequity aversion. Moreover, inequity aversion shows a clear developmental trajectory, with young children rejecting only disadvantageously unequal distributions and older children rejecting both disadvantageously and advantageously unequal distributions. However, based on existing work, it is difficult to compare adult and child responses to inequity because (1) adapting economic games to make them child-friendly may importantly alter the dynamics of the fairness interaction and (2) adult work typically uses abstract rewards such as money while work with children typically uses more concrete rewards like candy, stickers or toys. Here we adapted the Inequity Game—a paradigm designed to study children’s responses to inequality in isolation from other concerns—to test inequity aversion in adults (N = 104 pairs). We manipulated whether participants made decisions about concrete rewards (candy) or abstract rewards (tokens that could be traded in for money). We found that, like children, adults rejected unequal payoffs in this task. Additionally, we found that reward type mattered: adults rejected disadvantageous—but not advantageous—monetary distributions, yet rejected both disadvantageous and advantageous candy distributions. These findings allow us to draw clearer comparisons across child and adult responses to unfairness and help paint a fuller picture of inequity aversion in humans.