Preschool Lessons in Fairness

This week’s article summary is Preschool Lessons in Fairness May Last a Long Time.

Last year one of my article summaries was Preschool: The Most Important Year, which explained how high-quality early education experiences support habit and skill development of self-regulation, the basics of interpersonal relationships, and further foster creativity and curiosity through play.

Add to this list learning how to be fair.

Early childhood education is so important because it’s when most of us begin to learn how to coexist and work and play with others: how to take turns, how to deal with not always getting our way, how to be nice, how to share.

One evening last month early childhood expert Dr. Dipesh Navsaria spoke at Trinity. He emphasized three keys to successful intra/interpersonal skills and habits as adults: our genes, our experiences, and our relationship with parents, caregivers, and teachers.

We are all social animals, yet we must learn and practice how to interact with others. Early childhood experiences are an essential building block of the strong foundation upon which subsequent success and happiness is built.

Joe

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"Play fair" may be one of the earliest lessons of preschool—perhaps even before the ABCs and 123s—and a new study suggests cementing that skill early can make for more just adults decades later. 

A new study in the journal Nature Communications looks at students who participated in the landmark Abecedarian project, a large longitudinal study of pre-K programs in North Carolina in the 1970s. Participating students in the original study were randomly assigned to either a control group that received basic food, health care, and family social support, or an intervention group that received five years of intensive academic and social skills instruction. The current follow-up study suggests that experience may prime them to take a more just approach to social situations.

In the new study, subjects played the "ultimatum game." It's a common test in economics and psychology in which one player is given $20 and decides how to split it with another player. The second player can accept or reject the deal; if it is rejected, neither player gets any money. In this study, the offers were randomly generated by a computer algorithm rather than by another player.

Over time, research has found that players often walk away from an unfair split like $16/$4 if it benefits the other person, but accept the split if it benefits them—and players in the control group followed this trend. But former Abecedarian students were significantly more likely than others to reject offers that were unfair to either side—even when that meant turning down a bigger share of the money.

In fact, the more money offered to former Abecedarian students in an unfair exchange, the more likely they were to reject it. "Since rejecting offers in the game is akin to punishing the proposer, this rejection pattern can be considered a strong social signal aimed at enforcing equality during exchanges," the researchers wrote. They suggested early childhood experiences may have led to a stronger belief in reciprocity, making the former Abecedarian students focus less on immediate benefits of an unfair split and more on the need to "pay back" a favorable split later.

The Abecedarian project is one of the most rigorous and longest-running studies of the immediate and long-term effects of high-quality preschools, and follow-up studies have found benefits for students in terms of their college-going and choosing to parent at later ages among other things. These new findings suggest that some of the earliest preschool lessons in sharing and social-emotional development may also have long-term benefits for students.