Verification Report: Egalitarianism in Young Children

The present study sought to evaluate the reproducibility of prominent findings stated by Fehr et al. (2008) in their developmental resource allocation experiment. The experiment involved children making decisions about distributing sweets between themselves and either an in-group or an out-group recipient. Fehr et al. found that (1) inequity aversion develops with age; (2) 3- to 4-year-old children are inclined toward self-advantageous allocations, whereas 7- to 8-year-olds distribute sweets more evenly in divisions, and (3) the influence of group status increases as children age. In our attempts to reproduce Fehr et al.’s original analyses and reanalyse the raw data set, we found that one of the key variables was miscoded. After rectifying the miscoded variable, the reproduction results revealed only one ambiguously irreproducible result regarding a group status main effect in the sharing mini-game—with three other tests exhibiting either strong reproducibility or ambiguous reproducibility following the classifications suggested by Artner et al. (2021). Reanalysis results indicated that Fehr et al.’s conclusions are robust when tested with alternative analytical tests.