Symbolic Counting Predicts Exact Equality Norms, Non-symbolic Number Cognition Predicts Approximate Equality

• In Event: How Much is Fair: Integrating the Development of Numerical Cognition with Children's Understanding of Fairness

Abstract

During the preschool age, children quickly acquire norms surrounding fair sharing. Typically, work on this topic focuses on the critical role of extrinsic social factors in acquiring social norms, such as parenting, education, family composition, and socialization. Relatively less work has focused on the intrinsic, cognitive factors associated with social norm acquisition. Following recent work (Chernyak et al., 2016; 2019; Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016) showing that resource distribution behavior is predicted by children’s counting skills, we explored the extent to which norms surrounding equal sharing were predicted by two numerical competencies: children’s approximate number system acuity (abilities to discriminate between large sets of numbers), and their counting proficiency (symbolic counting skills).
In particular, we focused on the acquisition of 3 possible sharing norms during early childhood: 1) exact equality (that everyone must receive exactly the same), 2) approximate equality (that people should have approximately equal amounts, and 3) giving any (that people have an obligation to give something).
In Study 1, 62 preschoolers (age range: 2.6-6 years) completed 8 trials of a within-subjects Fairness Norms Task in which they viewed 1 character with 10 candies share either 0, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 with another. After each trial, participants had to judge whether the split was “ok” or “not ok”. Afterwards, children completed 2 numerical cognition tasks – an Approximate Number System (ANS) Acuity Task, in which they were shown two sets of dots and asked to select the side with “more” dots (a measure of their non-symbolic numerical abilities), and a Give-a-Number task in which they were asked to physically produce sets of 1-6 ducks (a measure of their symbolic counting abilities). We were interested in studying how these related to children’s assessment of fairness norms.
Overall, as expected, children were most likely to accept equal splits, and least likely to accept selfish splits, and these tendencies increased with age. We found an important dissociation, however, in the types of fairness norms that each numerical cognition ability predicted. In particular, symbolic counting predicted children’s tendency to judge the equality trial as OK, and judge the selfish split (giving 0) as not OK. In contrast, children’s ANS acuity predicted their tendency to accept trials that were close to equal splits (i.e., 6/4 splits; see Figure 2).
In Study 2 (N = 29, data collection ongoing), we whether conceptual understanding of 0 may help children acquire norms against selfishness (keeping all candies). Here, we presented children with the same tasks along with 2 tasks assessing children’s symbolic and non-symbolic understanding of 0. Results are ongoing, but thus far, we replicate the effect of symbolic counting on exact equality norms. Additional analyses will investigate the extent to which understanding 0 is related to children’s acquisition of giving any as a social norm.
Results suggest that different sharing norms are underpinned by different cognitive competencies, and have implications for individual differences in sharing norms in adults.

Authors

• Nadia Chernyak, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Sifana Sohail, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author