Young children do not perceive distributional fairness as a moral norm.

Abstract

Young children robustly distinguish between moral norms and conventional norms (Smetana, 1984;. In existing research, norms about the fair distribution of resources are by definition considered part of the moral domain; they are not distinguished from other moral norms such as those involving physical harm. Yet an understanding of fairness in resource distribution (hereafter, "fairness") emerges late in development and is culturally variable, raising the possibility that fairness may not fall squarely in the moral domain. In 2 preregistered studies, we examined whether U.S. American children who were primarily White see fairness as a moral or conventional norm. In study 1 (N = 96), we did not obtain the established moral-conventional difference needed to investigate questions about the status of fairness. We improved our design in our second preregistered study. In study 2 (N = 94), 4-year-olds rated moral transgressions (e.g., hitting) as more serious than fairness and conventional transgressions (e.g., wearing pajamas to school), but importantly, they rated fairness and conventional transgressions as similarly serious. In contrast, 6-and 8year-olds rated moral transgressions as more serious than fairness and conventional transgressions, and fairness as more serious than conventional transgressions. An additional, forced-choice procedure revealed that most 6-year-olds also categorized fairness with moral rather than conventional transgressions; 4-and 8year-olds' responses on this measure did not show systematic patterns. U.S. American children may not equate norms of fairness in resource distribution with harm-based moral norms, even into middle childhood.

Beyond Our Tribe: Developing a Normative Sense of Group-Transcendent Fairness

“…GROUP-TRANSCENDENT FAIRNESS Based on the research reviewed, we hypothesize that it would be mostly likely to observe adults and older children (age 8 and above), but not younger children, to endorse grouptranscendent fairness over ingroup support. This is consistent with the findings that children by age 8 start to think fairness transgressions as more serious than conventional violations (Yucel et al, 2022) and they prefer equal allocations over allocations that favor themselves (e.g., Blake et al, 2015;Blake & McAuliffe, 2011;Fehr et al, 2008;Sheskin et al, 2014). At the same time, group-transcendent fairness might also be culturally dependent, such that only people in western societies with strong emphasis on egalitarian values (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010;Henrich, 2020) would endorse it over ingroup support.…”

Beyond our tribe: Developing a normative sense of group-transcendent fairness.

“…Based on the research reviewed, we hypothesize that it would be mostly likely to observe adults and older children (age 8 and above), but not younger children, to endorse group-transcendent fairness over ingroup support. This is consistent with the findings that children by age 8 start to think fairness transgressions as more serious than conventional violations (Yucel et al, 2022) and they prefer equal allocations over allocations that favor themselves (e.g., Blake et al, 2015; Blake & McAuliffe, 2011; Fehr et al, 2008; Sheskin et al, 2014). At the same time, group-transcendent fairness might also be culturally dependent, such that only people in western societies with strong emphasis on egalitarian values (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Henrich, 2020) would endorse it over ingroup support.…”

Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering

“…While our findings suggest a bidirectional tendency to generalize from moral norm violations from help/harm to fairness and vice versa, a descriptive characterization of the effect sizes across studies indicates that infants generalize more strongly from hindering behavior to unfairness ( d = 1.067) than they do from unfair behavior to hindering ( d = 0.815). Coupled with the fact that infants show a sensitivity to help/harm prior to when they show a sensitivity to fairness/unfairness ( Sommerville, 2022 ), and the fact that individuals tend to see hindering as more egregious than unfairness ( Yucel et al, 2022 ), these findings raise the possibility that the degree to which infants will generalize from a given moral behavior may vary according to the severity of that behavior. Future work can directly test this idea.…”

“…We also sought to compare the relative strength of these generalizations based on the original sub-domain. On the one hand, one might predict that infants will generalize more strongly from hindering versus unfairness given that hindering is often see as more egregious than unfairness ( Yucel et al, 2022 ), and that infants appear to be sensitive to help/harm before fairness/unfairness in their evaluations ( Sommerville, 2022 ). On the other hand, we might expect the opposing pattern given that some work suggests that while infants have baseline expectations for fair distributions, they do not have baseline expectations for helpful behavior (but see Hamlin et al, 2007 ; Lucca et al, 2018 ).…”