The impact of social relationships on children’s distributive justice.

Abstract

Previous work has provided evidence that both merit and social relationships guide resource distribution in children. However, no prior studies have addressed the question of how children as third-party distributors balance the 2 factors when they are in conflict with one another. Two studies tested 7-year-old Chinese children’s allocation of 3 and 4 rewards for work performed by 3 different pairs of recipients. In each pair, 1 recipient was a stranger and the other recipient was either the child’s friend, a disliked peer, or another stranger. The 2 recipients were either equally deserving (Study 1, N = 48) or unequally deserving, with the child’s friend/disliked peer/another stranger having completed less (Study 2a, N = 48; Follow-Up study, N = 60) or more (Study 2b, N = 48) work to deserve the rewards. The children generally showed a positive bias toward their friend; the children gave more resources to their friend than to an equally deserving stranger (Study 1) and distributed resources equally when the friend was less deserving (Study 2a and Follow-Up combined). The children also showed negative bias toward the disliked peer by distributing resources equally when he or she was more deserving than the stranger (Study 2b). The children adhered to merit when distributing between two strangers (Study 1, 2b, combined Follow-Up). These findings suggest that, by 7 years of age, children resolve conflicts between social relationships and merit by basing resource allocation decisions on relationships, but they moderate those decisions depending on the recipients’ merit.

Waste Aversion Reduces Inequity Aversion Among Chinese Children

“…For one, differences in accounting for waste fit well with a developmental trajectory that was recently found in other objectrelated domains (e.g., scarcity-bias; Diesendruck et al, 2019), wherein behavioral similarities among 4-year-old Israelis and Chinese diverged according to culture-specific values by 7 years old. Second, differences in accounting for relational considerations seem to follow the same trajectory such that favoritism toward in-direct friends decrease by about 7 years old among Americans (Olson & Spelke, 2008;Shaw & Olson, 2012) but remains a legitimate factor to act upon among 7-year-old Chinese (Study 1b;Zhang, 2020). Together, the differences regarding object-related and relational consideration converge to suggest that middle childhood could be a sensitive period in development in which manifestations of cultural values and norms start to become salient.…”

“…When merit is involved, Chinese and Americans preferred to distribute resources and knowingly created unequal outcomes in favor of hard workers (i.e., merit-based equity; Study 1b). However, when friends are involved, only Chinese were leaning toward creating unequal outcomes that benefitted the experimenter's friend, as well as their own friends (Zhang, 2020). Such partial behavior raises the possibility that aversion from partiality could be lower among Chinese than American children.…”

Neoliberalism and the Ideological Construction of Equity Beliefs

“…Recent work hints at sources of heterogeneity in children’s and adults’ fairness preferences. Although merit-based reasoning is culturally widespread (Liénard et al, 2013; Zhang, 2020), people from collectivist cultures appear more likely to prefer equal distributions than do people from individualistic cultures. In one study, Chinese adults liked allocators who divided rewards equally more than people who divided rewards equitably (i.e., according to merit) and viewed equal allocations as fairer than equitable ones (Leung & Bond, 1984).…”

Is Distributional Justice Equivalent to Prosocial Sharing in Children’s Cognition?

“…In the event of conflict between social relationships and contributions to allocation, children younger than seven decide based on social relationship. They adjust these allocation decisions in relation to the size of the recipient’s contribution ( Zhang, 2020 ). At the group level, social distance affects individuals’ response to the unfair behavior of in- and out-group members, and individuals show in-group preferences even if in-group members violate the distribution principle ( Zhang and Zhao, 2018 ).…”