The Development of Fairness Expectations and Prosocial Behavior in the Second Year of Life

Abstract

Recent work provides evidence that expectations regarding a fair (i.e., equal) distribution of goods and resources arise sometime in the second year of life. To investigate the developmental trajectory of fairness expectations, and their potential relation to prosocial behavior, infants participated in a violation‐of‐expectancy (VOE) paradigm designed to assess expectations regarding how resources are typically distributed, and in a sharing task, an informational helping task, and an instrumental helping task. Infants’ expectations regarding resource distribution showed age‐related changes between 12 and 15 months, with only 15‐month‐old infants showing greater attention to unfair (unequal) over fair (equal) outcomes in the VOE. Individual differences in infants’ sensitivity to unfair outcomes were related to infants’ willingness to share a preferred toy. In contrast, helping behavior was unrelated to infants’ sensitivity to unfair outcomes and did not vary according to whether infants shared a preferred or non‐preferred toy during the sharing task. Our findings suggest a developmental transition in expectations regarding how resources are distributed from 12 to 15 months of age, linked to infants’ sharing behavior, suggesting that such expectations are learned through experience. Our results also contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding how best to assess the construct of prosociality in infancy.

Ontogeny of prosocial behavior across diverse societies

“…The fact that our youngest participants (<5-6 y) were relatively more likely to engage in costly prosociality than immediately older children (7-9 y) is a surprising finding, although it is consistent with the considerable evidence that children aged 3 y and younger act prosocially (22,(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44). Indeed, prosociality has been found as early as 25 mo of age in choice tasks similar to the one used here (26).…”

Precursors to morality in development as a complex interplay between neural, socioenvironmental, and behavioral facets

“…Additionally, infants' and toddlers' individual differences in Nc (300-500 ms) for viewing positive versus bad actions or in LPP/PSW (600-1,000 ms) were not related to the expression of sharing behaviors. Although sharing behaviors in infancy and toddlerhood appear to be common (47), many have questioned whether such early expressions are actually representative of morality or rather early self-regulation, compliance, and effortful control (48,49). Consistent with the latter argument, our results suggest that sharing propensity is directly related to children's temperamental effortful control.…”

The multidimensional nature of early prosocial behavior: a motivational perspective

“…Two studies found moderate consistency across some prosocial behaviors even in 12-and 18-month-old infants [24][25]. In one study [24], 18-month-old infants were presented with a sharing task and two kinds of instrumental helping tasks (one without emotional cues and one with emotional cues).…”