Normative expectations about fairness: The development of a charity norm in preschoolers

Wörle, Monika; Paulus, Markus

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2017.03.016

Cited by 76 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Importantly, differences were also found in children's judgments of others’ allocation decisions. These results extend past literature examining children's judgments of equal, equitable, and meritorious allocations (Rizzo et al., ; Schmidt et al., ; Wörle & Paulus, ) by documenting children's early ability to distinguish between the fairness or unfairness of these allocation strategies in response to explicitly individually and structurally based inequalities. Given children's early preference for strict equality, it is important to know when children begin to differentiate between different forms of unequal allocations.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Do Children Distinguish Between Resource Inequalities With Individual Versus Structural Origins?

2018

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This study investigated children's ability to distinguish between resource inequalities with individual versus structural origins. Children (3‐ to 8‐years‐old; N = 93) were presented with resource inequalities based on either recipients’ merit (individual factor) or gender (structural factor). Children were assessed on their expectations for others’ allocations, own allocations, reasoning, and evaluations of others’ allocations. Children perpetuated merit‐based inequalities and either rectified or allocated equally in response to gender‐based inequalities. Older, but not younger, children expected others to perpetuate both types of inequalities and differed in their evaluations and reasoning. Links between children's allocations and judgments were also found. Results reveal novel insights into children's developing consideration of the structural and individual factors leading to resource inequalities.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Do Children Distinguish Between Resource Inequalities With Individual Versus Structural Origins?

2018

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“…Different studies demonstrate that preschoolers have a preference to allocate more resources (between other people) and share at greater levels (between self and others) with resource-poor, rather than resource-rich recipients [43,44,45]. Alongside these behavioural findings, research also suggests that older preschoolers have normative expectations for more charitable distributions to poor, rather than rich recipients [46]. Thus, any preference to share more with the puppet that was awarded with stickers is unlikely to be influenced by an associationist strategy, but rather reflects the levels of competence demonstrated by the high merit puppet co-worker.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Such reasoning (e.g., thinking about what the puppet would think about them) involves more advanced forms of social understanding (e.g., second order false belief), and is considered to be beyond the capabilities of pre-schoolers [47]. However, pre-schoolers are sensitive to social cues (e.g., the presence of watching eyes) and modify their levels of generosity in such contexts [44,45,46]. This suggests that three-and four-year-olds within the present study, at least implicitly, are able to make inferences about how their co-worker puppet would view their sharing behaviour.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others

Stack

Romero-Rivas

2020

PLoS ONE

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Non-windfall approaches to sharing demonstrate pre-schoolers' sensitivity to merit-based distributions of resources. However, such studies have not considered (1) whether epistemic aspects of task performance, such as the relative accuracy of a co-worker, influences pre-schoolers' rates of sharing; and (2) how children's emerging social understanding may impact resource allocations in high-and low-merit situations. These issues are of theoretical importance as they may provide new information about the scope of pre-schooler's meritbased sharing behaviours. Moreover, as social understanding has been related to both increases and decreases in pre-schoolers' levels of sharing, providing a merit-based assessment of this relationship would allow for a concurrent assessment of recent conflicting findings. In this study, three-and four-year-olds (N = 131) participated in an unexpected transfer task which was followed by a resource generation picture card naming task with a reliable or unreliable (high-or low-merit) co-worker (a hand puppet). The results showed that children engage in more generous rates of sharing with a high-merit co-worker. This suggests that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children and extends to epistemic aspects of task performance. However, such sharing was constrained by a self-serving bias. Finally, we were not able to detect an effect of children's performance on the false belief task on sharing behaviours in the high-or low-merit trials, suggesting that these behaviours may not be modulated by social understanding during early childhood.

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“…In this task, we opted to use puppets to ensure that our stimuli did not inadvertently contain any gender, racial, or socioeconomic cues. Prior work has found that children are willing to engage in a host of behaviors towards puppets, including sharing (Chernyak & Kushnir, ), protesting and correcting (Rackozy, Warneken, & Tomasello, ), making moral evaluations (Hamlin, ), engaging in punishment (Worle & Paulus, ), and enforcing norms of fair sharing (Rakoczy et al., ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining early moral hypocrisy: Numerical cognition promotes equal sharing behavior in preschool‐aged children

Chernyak

Harris

Cordes

2018

Developmental Science

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Recent work has documented that despite preschool-aged children's understanding of social norms surrounding sharing, they fail to share their resources equally in many contexts. Here we explored two hypotheses for this failure: an insufficient motivation hypothesis and an insufficient cognitive resources hypothesis. With respect to the latter, we specifically explored whether children's numerical cognition-their understanding of the cardinal principle-might underpin their abilities to share equally. In Experiment 1, preschoolers' numerical cognition fully mediated age-related changes in children's fair sharing. We found little support for the insufficient motivation hypothesis-children stated that they had shared fairly, and failures in sharing fairly were a reflection of their number knowledge. Numerical cognition did not relate to children's knowledge of the norms of equality (Experiment 2). Results suggest that the knowledge-behavior gap in fairness may be partly explained by the differences in cognitive skills required for conceptual and behavioral equality.

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Normative expectations about fairness: The development of a charity norm in preschoolers

Cited by 76 publications

References 34 publications

Do Children Distinguish Between Resource Inequalities With Individual Versus Structural Origins?

Do Children Distinguish Between Resource Inequalities With Individual Versus Structural Origins?

Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others

Explaining early moral hypocrisy: Numerical cognition promotes equal sharing behavior in preschool‐aged children

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