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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Developmental research on fairness has classically focused on children’s evaluation of norms and behaviors. Yet, little is known about how these judgments are affected by children’s ability to engage in appropriate resource distribution. Adults often take for granted the ability to produce any desired allocation. For children, however, creating a distribution is far from trivial, particularly before they know how to count. This symposium presents advances in research integrating numerical cognition and fairness to better understand how children’s cognitive abilities influence their understanding of fairness.

Paper one investigates whether concerns for fairness make children more likely to ensure that two agents received exactly (rather than approximately) equal shares. Children’s ability to count predicted the ability to create equal sets, but a fairness framing did not affect their behavior, suggesting that mastery of abstract exact equality precedes its use in fairness tasks. Paper two investigates whether symbolic and non-symbolic number knowledge predict children’s understanding of fairness norms. Counting predicted children’s tendency to endorse exact equality while non-symbolic numerical cognition predicted children’s tendency to endorse approximately equal splits, suggesting that number knowledge affects children’s endorsement of exact vs. approximate equality. Finally, paper three investigates whether numerical procedures affect children’s fairness judgements. Children evaluated an agent who counted during resource distribution as fairer than an agent who did not, even when they produced identical outcomes. Together, this symposium shows the rich interaction between children’s numerical knowledge and fairness intuitions, highlighting the need for interdisciplinary research that integrates these historically disparate areas of research.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Colin Jacobs, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Not Exactly Fair: Investigating the Relationship Between Symbolic Number Knowledge and Equitable Resource Distribution in Children - Presenting Author: Rose Schneider, University of California - San Diego; Non-Presenting Author: Roman Feiman, Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: David A Barner, University of California - San Diego

• Symbolic Counting Predicts Exact Equality Norms, Non-symbolic Number Cognition Predicts Approximate Equality - Presenting Author: Nadia Chernyak, University of California - Irvine; Non-Presenting Author: Sifana Sohail, University of California, Irvine

• Precision in Procedure: The Influence of Exactness on Fairness Judgements - Presenting Author: Colin Jacobs, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Rosie Aboody, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Julian Jara-Ettinger, Yale University