Getting What You Pay For: Children's Use of Market Norms to Regulate Exchanges

Abstract

Children are sensitive to a number of considerations influencing distributions of resources, including equality, equity, and reciprocity. We tested whether children use a specific type of reciprocity norm-market norms-in which resources are distributed differentially based strictly on amount offered in return. In two studies, 195 children 5-10 years and 60 adults distributed stickers to friends offering same or different amounts of money. Overall, participants distributed more equally when offers were the same and more unequally when offers were different. Although sensitive to why friends offered different amounts of money, children increasingly incorporated market norms into their distributions with age, as the oldest children and adults distributed more to those offering more, irrespective of the reasons provided.

The impact of social relationships on children’s distributive justice.

“…The experimenter counted the number of erasers that each recipient received after the child left and double-checked the accuracy by reviewing the videos after the test. We computed the difference score and adjusted difference score for each participant (Echelbarger, Gelman, & Kalish, 2018;Renno & Shutts, 2015). The difference scores were obtained by subtracting the number of erasers distributed to the stranger (stranger on the right in the stranger condition) from the number of erasers distributed to the friend/disliked peer/ stranger on the left in the stranger condition, which ranged from Ϫ3 to 3 when distributing three erasers and ranged from Ϫ4 to 4 when distributing four erasers.…”

Children strategically conceal selfishness

“…We speculate that children's facility with proposing and responding to Ultimatum Game offers relates to familiarity with market norms. Emerging work on this topic shows that American children are sensitive to market norms (Echelbarger et al, 2019), but whether children in societies with limited market exposure show such sensitivity is unclear. Working with children from such societies is a topic for further study.…”

Children and Consumer Behavior: Insights, Questions, and New Frontiers

“…Indeed, the folk tendency to disapprove of market‐based (utility‐maximizing) economic exchanges (also known as “emporiophobia;” Boyer & Peterson, ) arguably reflects the contrast between impersonal, structural systems to manage the exchanges of resources (using money), and those resource exchanges that are local, personal, and relationship‐based. Both perspectives are fundamental—even young children at times value resource‐maximizing motives, and at times value those that are altruistic (Echelbarger, Gelman, & Kalish, ,b; McGuire, Elenbaas, Killen, & Rutland, ). The key point here is that there is a continuous thread linking foundational human object concepts with concepts of the self, but also that an important task of childhood is to acquire culturally‐specific norms regarding what is appropriate in different contexts (i.e., when to embrace vs. reject market norms).…”