You picked them up from school, dropped them off at an activity, picked them up again, and are headed home. The whole time, they’ve been punching each other in the backseat for no apparent reason. The first thing to check is if there is an unequal distribution of digital technology: nothing creates backseat strife like the desperate unfairness of one iPad split among more than one child. That said, there’s a complex formula for fairness. For example, if a child plays on a digital device while waiting for another child’s activity to end, does that mean that when the activity is over, the previously busy child should get the screen? If reading a book earns an older child screen time but a younger child isn’t yet able to read, does playing an educational iPad game earn the younger child recreational iPad time?
These are important calculations with the power to create either peace and harmony or rancor and overall transportation misery. And these calculations aren’t limited to your kids. How do you divide chores with your partner? What’s fair? Does picking up dog waste in the backyard once a week balance doing the dishes every night? Does a little skilled labor like rehanging a ceiling fixture balance a lot of more general labor like folding laundry? If one of you takes the kids to a birthday party at an indoor arcade so that the other has time to work, does the birthday party parent earn the right to free time after the party while the parent who stayed home to work watches the kids? Does the calculation change if the birthday party was somewhere slightly less hellish than an indoor arcade? Does it change the measure of fairness if there were adult beverages at the kids’ birthday party?
The idea of fairness is subjective and open to negotiation. But when the scale of fairness tips, bad feelings are the result.
This is not a new problem. Almost all religions and philosophies have thoughts on fairness. For example, the Edda, a collection of thirteenth-century Icelandic verses that forms much of the modern understanding of medieval Norse mythology, says, “Man ought to be a friend to his friend and repay gift with gift. People should meet smiles with smiles and lies with treachery.” You can almost see some poor dude with a big red beard and horned helmet sitting in the front of the longboat scratching these words on vellum sheets as his kids try to reach far enough across the back bench to whack each other with small stone hammers, the Viking equivalent of a fast-food toy.
More recently, the idea of fairness has jumped from the realms of philosophy, religion, and government into the research labs of economics. Take the famous ultimatum game. In its classic form, two people are splitting a pile of money. The first person proposes a split, and if the second accepts it, they both get paid. But if the second person rejects the proposed split, neither gets anything. Imagine both players are rational. If player A suggests splitting a pile of pennies ninety-nine to one, player B realizes that one penny is better than none and so accepts the proposal. But that’s not at all what happens in real life. In real life, player B tends to tell player A where player A can stick that single penny—it’s not rational, but it is fair. In fact, a long line of research shows that proposed splits that are more than 20 percent unequal tend to be rejected.
Why would you reject a split that gave the other person sixty-one and you thirty-nine? I mean, you still get thirty-nine, right? One answer is that by fighting for fairness, you promote the continuation of a human society in which neighbors help neighbors, we all respect traffic signals, and no one litters in public parks. When people play more than one round of these economic games, researchers see that everyone is more fair. It makes sense: if you expect an eye for an eye, you probably won’t act in a way that removes that first eye.
You can see this in another famous economic game, the prisoner’s dilemma. In the PD, two crooks are caught and imprisoned in separate cells. Now they have to decide independently whether or not to rat out the other person. If both refuse to talk, both serve one year on a reduced charge. If one squeals and the other stays quiet, the one who cut a deal goes free and the other serves three years. If they both squeal, they both serve two years.
Now, no matter what your partner in crime does, you’re better off squealing: if your partner stays quiet, you get off instead of serving one year, and if your partner squeals, you serve two years as opposed to three. But if you could trust that the other crook would go against his personal self-interest and keep his dirty mouth shut, you could do the same and minimize the overall time served—you would each serve one year for a total of two years served, as opposed to some combination of jail time that equals a total of four years.
The prisoner’s dilemma and the ultimatum game seem like artificial creations of people who spend too much time with numbers and not enough time with people … until you look through the lens of these games out into the world. The arms race of the Cold War was a great prisoner’s dilemma: both the United States and the Soviet Union were better off building weapons no matter what the other country’s decision was (but if both had stopped, both could have benefited). Doping in pro cycling and baseball is another example: if no one used human growth hormone to grow to the size of a small island nation, then no one would have an advantage; if everyone used HGH, the competitive advantage would be erased too, and everyone would end up with nerve pain, swelling, and carpal tunnel syndrome. But if some people use while others do not, the users win trophies and endorsement deals while the non-users end up adjusting training wheels in the back room of the local bike shop. Like the prisoner’s dilemma, stopping doping in sports requires athletes to trust that everyone will act fairly.
Another solution is the human experience of fairness itself. When someone gets away with cheating, a sibling sneaks more iPad time, or your partner watches bad reality television while you do the dishes, you know you’ve been wronged. And you are tempted to exact revenge, even if it means giving up personal gain to get back at the people who have acted unfairly against you. In the ultimatum game, your irrational internal experience of fairness makes you reject a nine-to-one split because it’s worth giving up a coin to keep the unfair a-hole proposing the split from earning nine. With the idea that what goes around comes around hardwired into our brains at the level of the species, we are pulled toward acting fairly.
The problem is that what is “fair” depends on your point of view. A person offering three coins while keeping seven may say, “Gosh, I’m so kind to be giving that person three coins that he or she wouldn’t have otherwise.” But the person looking at three coins on the table sees it differently: to that person, the only “fair” split is 50/50. Only when one opinion of “fair” overlaps with another opinion of “fair” is there room for a deal that pleases everybody. And that is one major reason why most ultimatum games end with a 60/40 split—a division that both parties can live with.
This is the purpose of the arguing that goes on in the backseat: to find a solution that meets both parties’ definition of fairness. And when there is no middle ground between opinions of fairness—when one kid hogs the iPad or when your partner doesn’t lift a finger around the house—the difference is expressed in outrage. That’s when the winner is forced to pay a “fairness penalty”—when, throughout our long history as a human species, one child punches the other in the backseat of transportation.
Hack Your Kids’ Self-Centered Fairness
Fairness is in the eye of the beholder. A 2002 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology shows this is even more true in individualistic cultures like the United States than in collectivist cultures such as Japan—if you feel like your personal power is more important than the good of the system as a whole, your idea of fairness can be very self-centered. So make the little gremlins in your backseat think collectively. Studies have shown that displaying symbols from a collectivist culture should do it … maybe hang Mao’s Little Red Book from the rearview mirror? Researchers have also primed collectivist thinking by asking subjects to think about the groups they belong to, to brainstorm ways they are like other people, or to list reasons it might be good to “blend in.” If you can find ways to help your kids remember that your family is in it together, you may all survive the ride home.