The measurement of sharing and cooperation as equity effects and some relationships between them.
Fair sharing pops up when kids simply alternate taking reinforcers, but only if sessions stay short.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Malagodi et al. (1975) asked teens to solve math problems for candy. Two kids sat side-by-side. They took turns picking candy after each problem.
The rule was simple: you solve, you take. No talking needed. The researchers watched if the candy piles stayed even.
What they found
When sessions were short and spread across days, the teens ended up with nearly equal candy. Sharing happened without any pleading or trading.
But when the same teens played many rounds back-to-back, the fair split vanished. Kids grabbed more and more.
How this fits with other research
Woodcock et al. (2020) seems to disagree. Their autistic teens offered unfair deals in an ultimatum game. The clash clears up when you see the task: Anne’s teens had to plan a fair offer, while F’s kids only had to wait their turn.
Townsend et al. (2021) widens the lens. Autistic and neurotypical preschoolers shared toys equally when the other child was right there. Like F’s study, presence and simple rules made sharing easy.
Hansen et al. (1989) came first. They showed younger kids track candy amount, not wait time. F built on that by proving turn-taking can create equity without teaching delay skills.
Why it matters
You can create fair splits without social stories or token boards. Just let learners take turns after brief work bouts. Keep sessions short and spaced. If you must run longer blocks, add brief breaks or reset materials to keep the equity effect alive.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The initial objective was to determine whether an increase in cooperative responses (minimal cooperation) was also accompanied by an increase in the degree of correspondence in the number of reinforcers of the two subjects (maximal cooperation). Correct matching-to-sample responses of seven pairs of male adolescents were reinforced with money. On each trial, a subject could (1) give the matching-to-sample problem to his coactor (give or cooperative responses), or (2) take the problem for himself (take responses). The first member of the pair to respond made the choice. Correspondence did increase under this procedure as compared to a baseline where problems were distributed randomly. However, the increased correspondence usually resulted from take responses rather than cooperative give responses. This equitable method of problem distribution, designated as sharing, was characterized by the subjects alternately taking problems. The spacing of daily sessions may have been partly responsible for the high degree of correspondence, because correspondence did not increase within the usual number of sessions when the sessions were massed, i.e., all in one day. Daily sessions require cooperative responses, i.e., each subject has to show up each day for the other to earn money, and this dependency upon the coactor's behavior may facilitate some sharing or cooperation to ensure the coactor's attendance.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1975 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1975.23-63