2016-02-01 10:15:40
I think I am not mistaken when affirming that a characteristic of our species is the sense of justice. Evaluating what is fair and what is not is a constant in our lives that has been with us since early childhood.
Although many may believe that the sense of justice resides in the “human spirit” and that, therefore, we all possess it equally by the mere fact of being human, this belief is not true. Social psychology studies carried out on what humans consider fair or not have revealed that the idea and norms of justice vary widely in different societies, which indicates that there is a cultural component that modulates the idea of justice. On the other hand, it does not seem that we are already born with the ability to discern what is fair from what is unfair, but that this ability, like walking or running, appears at some point in the development of children and matures with age.
The ability to discern what is fair from what is unfair plays a fundamental role in maintaining cooperation in human societies. Understanding what factors determine the sense of justice can be of enormous importance when trying to achieve what so many millions of people want: a fairer world. And it is that injustice not only comes from the unequal distribution of resources, but from our subjective perception of the distribution, even when it may be equitable.
To advance our understanding of how humans develop a sense of justice, researchers from several American universities, including Boston, Harvard, and Yale, as well as several Canadian universities, are studying how a sense of justice develops in 1,732 children. from 4 to 15 years old from seven different countries. In the study, the children are placed in pairs, and each of them is offered a number of sweets. One of the children is given the power to decide if she accepts the treats or not. If she accepts them, they both receive the reward set by the researchers; if she does not accept them, neither receives anything. Thus, a sweet can be offered to each child, an equitable distribution, or four sweets to one and only one to the other, a clearly unfair distribution.
In this way, the child of the couple with the power to decide can face three situations: an equitable distribution (1:1), an unfair disadvantageous distribution for him (1:4) and an unfair advantageous distribution for him (4:1 ). In each of these situations he can decide to accept the treats or reject them, in which case this will be a loss for him, since he will get nothing when, at the very least, he could get a treat. Refusing a certain offer can thus give us an idea of the aversion that the child shows for injustice, whether it harms him or benefits him.
aversion to injustice
The children participating in the study came from the US, Canada, India, Mexico, Peru, Senegal and Uganda. All the children, regardless of the country of origin, rejected the offers that placed them in an unfair disadvantageous situation for them. However, only children from three countries, the US, Canada and Uganda, also declined offers that put them in an advantageous situation with respect to their partner.
These data, published in the journal Nature, indicate that aversion to injustice that causes us a disadvantage seems to be a more universal human characteristic than rejection of an unfair situation that gives us an advantage. However, the intensity of the rejection of the disadvantageous situation depended on the age of the children and the country of origin. Children as young as 4 to 6 years old from Canada and the US have already been able to lose their candy in order to avoid an unfair disadvantageous situation for them. However, in stark contrast to their North American peers, the Mexican children only demonstrated this ability after 10 years of age.
This discrepancy points to cultural reasons. However, researchers do not know what these reasons may be and speculate that either the sense of justice develops differently in different cultures, or the rejection of the disadvantageous offer has less to do with injustice than with preserving a social status and an advantageous image with respect to potential competitors. In this sense, the most competitive societies, such as the US and Canada, were the ones that showed these tendencies in children the earliest.
Less clear still are the reasons why aversion to advantageous injustice only appears in children from three of the seven countries studied. This aversion increases with age and only appears in pre-adolescence, not in childhood. To explain this fact, the researchers speculate that Western societies place more emphasis on equality than those of other countries. The case of Uganda could be explained because the children in the study have been educated by Western teachers, who would have transmitted these values to them.
Be that as it may, it is clear that the development of a sense of justice depends on social factors that can promote it even when being fair is a disadvantage for us. This last sense of justice, perhaps the most important to really achieve justice in the world, possibly needs the encouragement of the communication of values that not all societies promote equally. Although much work remains to be done to find out what those values are and whether other social factors could explain the emergence of aversion to advantageous injustice, there is little doubt that justice must go hand in hand with education probably from childhood.
Reference: Blake, PR et al. Nature (2015).
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