Poster #123 - Children’s intuitions about voting and the “tyranny of the majority”.

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

In order to have an effective, just, and fair society, humans must be able to coordinate group action. Coordinating group action is not easy task as people often disagree about what is best for the group. To overcome such disagreements, one common method used in the adult world is voting. Although voting is regarded as fair, it can also yield unfair outcomes, exemplified as the Madisonian “Tyranny of the Majority”. Thus, voting is not always considered fair, but it is often seen as an appropriate way to make certain group decisions. Despite how crucial voting is as a process for group decision making, there has been very little work exploring how children think about voting and majority rule. The current experiments explore when and whether 4- to 11-year old children (N = 162) think that majority rule can be a fair way to make group decisions.
In Experiment 1 (n = 54), we ask children which snack a group should get: the snack that the majority wants or one that only one individual wants. We find that children at all ages tested think that the group should get what the majority wants. Importantly, we demonstrate that this effect is not merely driven by children thinking one should always go with the majority (or conformity). When the decision was about what snack an individual should get for herself, children thought that the individual should get the snack she wants, not the one that the majority think she should get. These results demonstrate that children can not only use consensus (Zhao & Kushnir, 2017), but also voting for enacting group decisions.
Experiment 2 (n = 60), we further explored contexts in which majority rule may and may not be considered a fair way to make group-decisions. Specifically, we add group information to a voting vignette, in which two groups in a classroom have to give up an unequal amount of markers for the class. When the majority voting for the policy includes the group being disadvantaged (or giving up more markers), 4- to 11- year olds seem to think that majority rules is a fair decision rule. However, when the majority voting for the policy include no member of the group being disadvantaged, children thought that majority rules was a less fair decision rule. That is, we demonstrate that 4- to 11-year olds think that it is less fair for a group decision to be made against the wishes of a disadvantaged group than when the disadvantaged group is voting in favor of their disadvantage.
The current experiments demonstrate that even from a young age, children think that majority rule is a satisfactory way to coordinate group action. However, majority rule is not seen as fair in-and-of-itself. That is, when decisions are made for an individual, or when decisions seem to disadvantage a group without their consent, majority rule is not seen as particularly fair. These results reveal that children can make nuanced judgments about the appropriateness of voting as a procedure.

Authors

• Hannah Hok, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Emily Gerdin, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alex Shaw, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author