Children’s reasoning about distributive and retributive justice across development.

Abstract

Research on distributive justice indicates that preschool-age children take issues of equity and merit into account when distributing desirable items, but that they often prefer to see desirable items allocated equally in third-party tasks. By contrast, less is known about the development of retributive justice. In a study with 4–10-year-old children (n = 123) and adults (n = 93), we directly compared the development of reasoning about distributive and retributive justice. We measured the amount of rewards or punishments that participants allocated to recipients who differed in the amount of good or bad things they had done. We also measured judgements about collective rewards and punishments. We found that the developmental trajectory of thinking about retributive justice parallels that of distributive justice. The 4–5-year-olds were the most likely to prefer equal distributions of both rewarding and aversive consequences; older children and adults preferred deservingness-based allocations. The 4–5-year-olds were also most likely to judge collective rewards and punishments as fair; this tendency declined with increasing age. Our results also highlight the extent to which the notion of desert influences thinking about distributive and retributive justice; desert was considered equally when participants allocated reward and punishments, but in judgments about collective discipline, participants focused more on desert in cases of punishment compared to reward. We discuss our results in relation to theories about preferences for equality vs. equity, theories about how desert is differentially weighed across distributive and retributive justice, and in relation to the literature on moral development and fairness.

“I wanted to hurt her”: Children’s and adolescents’ experiences of desiring and seeking revenge in their own peer conflicts

“…That being said, with age, youth became more likely to describe retaliating in order to teach a lesson to the perpetrator, suggesting that their own retaliation was increasingly understood to be deliberative and goal-directed with age. This interpretation is in line the findings of Smith and Warneken (2016), who found that older children increasingly engaged in retaliatory action on the basis of justice-related concerns with others' deservingness. Consider the following example from a 16-year-old girl, who described retaliating against a friend who had betrayed her trust by sharing private information with others:…”

“…Thus, if children's descriptions of retaliation are consistent with these patterns, younger children may describe carrying out desires for revenge more frequently than older children. On the contrary, Smith and Warneken (2016) found that older children are more likely to mete out punishments on the basis of "just deserts." Thus, it is also possible that older children may describe carrying out retaliation more often.…”

“…Similarly, few studies have addressed whether children's explanations for carrying out or containing their retaliatory desires may change with age. Smith and Warneken (2016) found that 4-to 10-year-old children increasingly referred to others' deservingness as accounting for their decisions to selectively mete out punishments in a lab-based task. Conversely, Smetana et al (2003) found that 8-year olds (as compared to 6-year olds) were more likely to judge retaliation to be wrong on the basis of its unjustified nature (e.g., "two wrongs don't make a right").…”

“…Starting in the first year of life, infants are attuned to retributive features of human interaction, showing a preference for negative reciprocity over indiscriminate prosociality; by 19 months, infants themselves respond in kind to individuals who had previously behaved in prosocial and transgressive ways (Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, & Mahajan, 2011). Similarly, in lab-based paradigms, a number of studies indicate that preschool-aged children will punish others who behave in harmful or unfair ways (see Smith & Warneken, 2016, for a review). In this sense, desires for revenge may be part and parcel of children's psychological lives, alongside other kinds of motives.…”

The developmental foundations of human fairness

“…However, our working definition of fairness is admittedly a lean one: namely, costly responses to unequal resource distributions. Of course, fairness judgments and behaviors are not restricted to these cases and an important direction for future work is to understand how children make decisions about other forms of fairness such as procedural 84 and retributive justice 85 . Additionally, we know that a suite of factors influences fairness behavior in adults and children, including reputational concerns 86 , perspective taking 87 , in-group favoritism 51 , as well as cues of deservedness such as merit 88 and need 7 .…”