Numerical cognition explains age-related changes in third-party fairness.

Abstract

Young children share fairly and expect others to do the same. Yet little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that support fairness. We investigated whether children's numerical competencies are linked with their sharing behavior. Preschoolers (aged 2.5-5.5) participated in third-party resource allocation tasks in which they split a set of resources between 2 puppets. Children's numerical competence was assessed using the Give-N task (Sarnecka & Carey, 2008; Wynn, 1990). Numerical competence-specifically knowledge of the cardinal principle-explained age-related changes in fair sharing. Although many subset-knowers (those without knowledge of the cardinal principle) were still able to share fairly, they invoked turn-taking strategies and did not remember the number of resources they shared. These results suggest that numerical cognition serves as an important mechanism for fair sharing behavior, and that children employ different sharing strategies (division or turn-taking) depending on their numerical competence. (PsycINFO Database Record

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

“…Prior work points to several correlates of cardinality that may be most relevant to active resource distribution: acquiring knowledge of the cardinal principle may increase the precision through which children perform intuitive division operations on the resources (McCrink & Spelke, ), provide a tool through which children can count out equal sets (Sarnecka & Wright, ) or help participants identify when sharing errors occur (Muldoon, Lewis, & Berridge, ). Consistent with our findings, in the latter two cases, cardinality, rather than subitizing or knower‐level knowledge, relates to these developments (see also Chernyak et al., ; Jara‐Ettinger et al., ; Moore, vanMarle, & Geary, ).…”

“…Initial analyses showed that girls were more likely to choose the equal split than boys, consistent with prior work finding that girls show a greater aversion to inequity (Chernyak et al., ; McAuliffe et al., ). Therefore, we control for gender in all of our subsequent models.…”

“…Results remain consistent with what is reported in the main text. We chose to present the binary coding scheme because additional analyses revealed no differences among Subset Knowers, which is consistent with prior work showing that cardinality, rather than knower‐level, is required for equal sharing (Chernyak et al., ; Jara‐Ettinger et al., ).…”

“…Eighteen additional children were tested but excluded due to equipment failure in recording the session ( n = 6), failure to complete the task ( n = 9), experimenter error ( n = 2), or prior participation in a similar or pilot version of the task ( n = 1). In both experiments, we used an a priori sample size stopping rule of N = 80 in keeping with the sample size used in our prior work which had employed a similar paradigm and identical age range (Chernyak, Sandham et al., ). In Experiment 1, after achieving this minimum, we continued testing additional children to counteract a later‐discovered counterbalancing error.…”

“…Understanding cardinality should be critically linked to the ability to ensure that each recipient has created two equal sets (Izard, Steri, & Spelke, ; Muldoon, Lewis, & Francis, ; Muldoon, Lewis, & Freeman, ; Sarnecka & Wright, ). Indeed, prior work suggests that in third‐party cases (Chernyak, Sandham et al., ; Jara‐Ettinger, Gibson, Kidd, & Piantadosi, ; Squire & Bryant, , ), in which children's own motivation is not at stake, number knowledge plays a critical role in shaping children's sharing behavior, and thus might be an important prerequisite for sharing resources fairly (see also Frydman & Bryant, ). For example, such prior work finds that the ability to divide resources equally among others is influenced by children's acquisition of the cardinal principle of counting (Chernyak, Sandham et al., ), or by the extent to which the division problem resembles prototypical sharing problems (Squire & Bryant, ).…”