The Effect of Relationship on Children's Distributive Justice Reasoning

Abstract

Kindergarten, third-grade, and sixth-grade children were told 2 stories about a group of children who made artwork that was subsequently sold at a craft fair. The characters in one story were described as friends, while the characters in the other story were described as strangers (relationship condition). 1 character in each story was presented as the oldest in the group, 1 as the most productive, and 1 as the poorest. Children were asked to allocate 9 dollars to the 3 characters under each relationship condition, provide rationales for those allocations, and rate the fairness of 4 different patterns of allocation. Older children allocated more money to needy friends than to needy strangers and more to productive strangers than to productive friends. Kindergartners' allocations and fairness ratings did not vary with relationship. Rationales for allocation judgments suggested that equality was the most salient principle for decisions at all ages, but the older children provided rationales based on benevolence more often than younger children when characters were presented as friends.

No one is going to recess: How children evaluate collective and targeted punishment

“…The study revealed that the younger (4- and 5-year-old) children were more likely to rate the collective punishment as fair and less likely to rate the targeted punishment as fair than were the older children. These findings align with the developmental shift from a tendency to prefer equality (everyone gets the same) to an increasing focus on equity (each person gets what they deserve) ( Baumard et al, 2012 ; Huppert et al, 2019 ; Hook & Cook, 1979 ; McGillicuddy-de Lisi et al, 1994 ; Shaw & Olson, 2012 ). In other words, younger children may be more likely than older children to view collective punishment as fair because such punishment entails an equal distribution of punishment to everyone, whereas older children may view targeted punishment as fair because only the individual deserving of punishment—the transgressor—is punished.…”

“…This shift is in line with a well-documented shift at these ages in children’s reasoning about equality and equity (see also Smith & Warneken, 2016 ). Prior work demonstrates that by around 5–6 years of age, children shift from preferring equal distributions to equitable distributions that integrate more complex aspects such as need and merit ( Damon, 1975 ; Fraser et al, 2007 ; Hook & Cook, 1979 ; McGillicuddy-de Lisi et al, 1994 ). Remarkably, this developmental shift from equality-based to equity-based reasoning emerges across a wide variety of contexts and cultures ( Huppert et al, 2019 ).…”

Native Amazonian children forego egalitarianism in merit‐based tasks when they learn to count

“…In doing so, they frequently ignore merit (Damon, ), need (Huntsman, ), and group membership (Fehr, Bernhard & Rockenbach, ; Olson & Spelke, ). As they grow older, children consistently start producing and preferring more complex distribution methods based on effort and other factors (Almås, Cappelen, Sørensen & Tungodden, ; Huntsman, ; Nelson & Dweck, ; Damon, , ; Sigelman & Waitzman, ; Lisi, Watkins & Vinchur, ) . This developmental change may be driven by children's increased experience in cooperative contexts, by explicit pedagogy, or by a mixture of both.…”

The development of recipient-dependent sharing behavior and sharing expectations in preschool children.

“…Commonly, in these scenarios children are presented with a number of resources, which do not belong to them, and different potential recipients. They are asked to distribute all the resources between recipients or to judge different resource allocations (e.g., Damon, 1977;Kenward & Dahl, 2011;McGillicuddy-De Lisi, Watkins, & Vinchur, 1994;Olson & Spelke, 2008). For example, Olson and Spelke (2008) asked 3.5-year-old children to help a protagonist distribute resources between pairs of different potential recipients.…”