SFU psychology PhD student John Corbit and a team of researchers have found that culture plays an important role in the perception of fairness among children, adding an important insight to the little-understood developmental origins of human fairness.

The study, published today in Nature, looks at children's aversion to two forms of inequity: advantageous (having more than a peer) and idisadvantageous inequity (having less than a peer) in seven diverse societies.  

In the study, researchers used a standardized resource-decision task where children were presented with distributions of food that placed them at either a relative advantage or disadvantage to a peer. Participants then had the option to accept or reject these distributions, allowing researchers measure the children's aversion to inequity based on their refusal of unequal offers.

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