Outcomes versus intentions in fairness-related decision making: School-aged children’s decisions are just like those of adults

Abstract

The notion of what constitutes fairness has been assumed to change during childhood, in line with a marked shift from outcome-based to intention-based moral reasoning. However, the precise developmental profile of such a shift is still subject to debate. This study sought to determine the age at which the perceived intentions of others begin to influence fairnessrelated decision-making in children (aged 6-8 and 9-11) and adolescents (aged 14-15) in the context of the mini-ultimatum game. The mini-ultimatum game has a forced-choice design whereby a proposer has to select one of two pre-determined offers that a responder can either accept or reject. Due to these constraints the procedure measures sensitivity to unfair intentions in addition to unfair outcomes. Participants had to make judgments about how likely they would be to reject various offers, how fair they judged these offers to be, and the emotion they experienced when thinking about the offer. Contrary to previous published reports, we found that even 6-to 8-year-olds employed a sophisticated notion of fairness that took into account the alternatives the proposer had available to them. Crucially, decisionmaking did not differ as a function of age. A further, and novel, aim was to trace the developmental origins of temporal asymmetries in judgments about fairness by testing the implications of adopting a past or a future temporal perspective. Across all ages, we found no evidence that fairness-based decision-making varies as a function of temporal location.

Strained agricultural farming under the stress of youths’ career selection tendencies: a case study from Hokkaido (Japan)

“…Overall career selection trends and the prospective role of specialized career counseling. During adolescence, young people make critical decisions (Featherman, 1980;Duryea et al, 2003;Jaroslawska et al, 2020). Our survey results at Sapporo Kaisei Secondary School show that the adolescents who have already decided about their career paths are strongly influenced by jobs in science and technology (around 76% want to join this field).…”

Counterfactual choices and moral judgments in children

“…Overall, however, 6-to 7-year-olds clearly showed that they are able to consider what characters could have chosen to do. It seems likely that 6-to 9-year-old children were inferring the intentions of the characters based on the choices that were available to them (as in Jaroslawska et al, 2020;Pesowski et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2021). That is, when a character had a choice, children could be more certain that they intended to either be mean or nice, whereas when characters did not have a choice, children could not be sure of their intentions.…”

“…There is some evidence that children make judgments of fairness based partly on the choices someone had available to them (Jaroslawska et al, 2020; Sutter, 2007). For example, Jaroslawska et al (2020) asked children aged 6–8 years to judge the fairness of an offer from a proposer in the context of a mini‐ultimatum game.…”

Inequity aversion in old age: An outcome bias in older adults’ socio-economic decisions

“…By contrast, if P proposes an unfair offer (8P/2R) but the only other alternative was the same unfair offer (8P/2R), participants will likely infer that P's offer does not signal a bad intention. Consistently, children and adults tend to reject OUTCOME-BASED PUNISHMENT 5 the intended unfair offer in a (8P/2R-5P/5R) trial but tend to accept the unintended unfair offer in a (8P/2R-8P/2R) trial (Falk et al, 2003;Jaroslawska et al, 2020;Radke et al, 2012).…”