2-024 - The Developmental Social Neuroscience of Fairness

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Fairness considerations fundamentally affect human social cognition and behavior. Children’s developing conceptions of fairness have recently been studied by psychologists, behavioral economists and cognitive neuroscientists. It has been shown that, with age, young children tend to become less selfish in their reasoning and choices, whereas the evidence for adolescents is more mixed. Furthermore, as they age, children tend to move from a strict egalitarian view toward fairness views taking into account individual contributions and circumstances. Fairness sensitivity and fairness-related norm enforcement seem to engage an intuitive and a deliberative system evidenced through multiple methods in developmental social cognitive neuroscience. However while this burgeoning field provides key insights into the mechanisms underlying judgments of resource allocation and fairness, developmental and neuroscience perspectives are rarely combined. The purpose of the present symposium is to bring together scholars who investigate the mechanisms underlying fairness from a developmental social neuroscience perspective, using a life-span approach ranging from infants to adults. The symposium will lead to productive interchange among developmental and neuroscience perspectives. It will provide new knowledge on how fairness evaluations develop in infants, young children, adolescents and adults, and what neural mechanisms underpin these abilities. It will be a showcase of on how development, neuroscience, and behavioral economics can be combined to help us illuminate theories of morality, and how these disciplines learn from each other.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chairs

• Jean Decety, University of Chicago

• Jason M Cowell, University of Wisconsin- Green Bay

Individual Presentations

• Infant Brain Correlates of Fairness Expectations - Caitlin M Hudac, University of Washington; Jacqueline Popisil, University of Washington; Presenting Author: Jessica A Sommerville, University of Washington

• Graded Inequality: Neural Relations to Developing Fairness Conceptions and their Relations to Distributive Justice Behaviors - Presenting Author: Jason M Cowell, University of Wisconsin- Green Bay; Jean Decety, University of Chicago

• Neural Signatures of Fairness Considerations in Adolescence - Presenting Author: Eveline Crone, Leiden University; Kiki Zanolie, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, the Netherlands; Berna Güroğlu, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, the Netherlands

• Fairness Preferences as Cognitive Heuristics: Behavioral, Psychophysiological and Neural Evidence - Presenting Author: Claudia Civai, University of Kent; Raffaella I Rumiati, International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy