1-079 - When is Inequality Acceptable? The Development of a Context-Sensitive Concern for Fairness in Infancy and Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Recent findings indicate that infants and young children generally expect resources to be divided equally among potential recipients. How and when do children begin to show sensitivity to the various contextual factors (such as merit, need, or impartiality) that can render inequality acceptable or even justified? This symposium examines children’s responses to inequality at different ages and in different contexts.

The first paper used third-party situations where infants observed distributions to two potential recipients. Results from two projects indicated that (1) 9-month-olds viewed inequality as expected when fairness dictated unequal compensations for unequal efforts and (2) 19-month-olds viewed inequality as expected when ingroup loyalty trumped fairness. The next two papers used third-party situations where children distributed resources to two potential recipients. In the second paper, 8-year-olds correctly took into account merit or need—but not arbitrary demand—in their distributions; 5-year-olds showed some emerging sensitivity to these factors; and 3-year-olds generally ignored these factors and produced equal distributions. The third paper showed that between 5 and 8 years of age, children became increasingly sensitive to impartiality: instead of throwing away a resource to create an equal distribution, they used an impartial means (but not a biased one) to produce an unequal distribution. Finally, the fourth paper used a first-party situation where children could accept or reject an advantageous inequality over an unfamiliar peer. Between 6 and 9 years of age, children became reliably more likely to reject this advantage when they could be observed by others.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Renee Baillargeon, University of Illinois

Individual Presentations

• Context-Sensitive Reasoning About Inequality in Infancy: The Cases of Just Rewards and Scarce Resources - Presenting Author: Lin Bian, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Stephanie Sloane, University of Illinois; Renee Baillargeon, University of Illinois

• Children’s Developing Understanding of Legitimate Departures From Egalitarian Distributions - Presenting Author: Jana Johe, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Marco F. H. Schmidt, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Margarita L Svetlova, Max Planck Institute; Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute

• The Impartiality Account of Fairness - Presenting Author: Alex W. Shaw, University of Chicago; Kristina R Olson, University of Washington

• Accepting an Advantage When no one can see: The Development of Partial Inequity Aversion - Presenting Author: Peter R Blake, Boston University; Katherine McAuliffe, Yale; Felix Warneken, Harvard University