3-083 - “The Art of the Deal”: Children Balance Competing Concerns in Exchange Contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Though young children may not seek to build multimillion dollar corporations, they do deal with some of the same problems as adults, despite ostensibly different contexts. That is, they are required to balance concerns for equality and equity, with self-interest and profit (value) maximization. The papers in this symposium examine how children allocate resources while navigating these competing motivations. In the first paper, 3-8-year-olds’ perspective within an inequality (whether advantaged, disadvantaged, witness) was shown to influence how they balanced moral concerns for fairness with ingroup concerns and their personal desire for resources in inequality contexts. In the second paper, children 3-10 years across two countries (U.S., India) were shown to incorporate others’ preferences into their distribution decisions; however, when interests conflicted, children in the U.S. prioritized their own preferences whereas children in India prioritized preferences of others. Lastly, in the third paper, children 5-10 years were shown to incorporate others’ preferences into third-party trading decisions, doing so in a way that leveraged those preferences for another’s gain. That is, knowing someone else’s preference for a particular item can override one’s preference to engage in equal trades. Taken together, results from these three papers demonstrate that young children engage in complex negotiations from a young age—balancing both competing and conflicting interests. A discussant expert in social cognition will discuss how children’s approach to negotiations, as described, reflects adult thinking—i.e., how the results from these three papers inform what we know about children’s developing understanding of the “rules of engagement.”

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Margaret Echelbarger, University of Chicago

Discussant

• Chuck Kalish, Society for Research in Child Development

Individual Presentations

• How Perspective Influences Children’s Perceptions of Merit- and Gender-Based Inequalities - Presenting Author: Michael Rizzo, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Kimberly Vanderbilt, California State University San Marcos; Non-Presenting Author: Melanie Killen, University of Maryland

• The Development of Negotiation Skills: Insights from the U.S and India - Presenting Author: Radhika Santhanagopalan, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Katherine Kinzler, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Boaz Keysar, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Sunita Sah, Cornell University

• She’ll Give You Two Cookies for One Chocolate: Children’s Intuitions About Trade - Presenting Author: Margaret Echelbarger, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Kayla Good, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Alex Shaw, University of Chicago