Poster #63 - Influences of Norms, Perspective-Taking, and Verbal Abilities on Preschoolers' Fairness in Third Party Distributions

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Fairness is a central concept within the fundamental moral beliefs of every person. A basic notion of fairness is already present early in ontogeny (Sloane et al., 2012) and expands in complexity and flexibility to circumstances with increasing age. Thus, children start to consider a pre-existing resource inequality in distribution games at about three years of age (Rizzo & Killen, 2016). The present study seeks to identify the cognitive processes serving as predictors for preschool children’s allocation decisions within a distribution game with two agents differing in terms of wealth. In order to perform actions that align with one’s moral compass, reasoning about fairness is crucial (Sommerville & Enright, 2018). Therefore, we consider children’s own fairness norms as a possible influencing factor. Based on prior work (Takagishi et al., 2010), we additionally hypothesize that the ability of perspective-taking is a significant factor to explain variance of fair behavior. Finally, we expect linguistic competence to be a prerequisite for the formation of norms as they are represented verbally (Smetana & Braeges, 1990).
We tested N = 101 three- to six-year-old children (n = 58 girls) within a longitudinal design. Participants completed a sticker distribution task between two agents differing in wealth with the options to either establish an equal split (equality), allocate more stickers to the agent who had few stickers (equity), or allocate more stickers to the agent who had a large number of stickers (inequity). We assessed sharing norms by children’s evaluations of two protagonists sharing either half or none of their resources with another person. Children’s theory of mind skills were tested using Wellman and Liu's (2004) task battery. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) was applied to assess children’s receptive vocabulary. To identify the focal predictors of children’s distribution decisions, we computed a stepwise regression with imputed data to account for missing values.
Partial correlations controlled for age imply that each of the proposed predictor variables, i.e., sharing norms, theory of mind, and receptive vocabulary, evidences a significant, positive, small to moderate association with children’s equitable distributions. Further, the regression showed that children’s appreciation of sharing norms (β = 0.194, p = .047) and receptive vocabulary (β = 0.233, p = .017) significantly predict children’s equitable distributions, R2 = .081, p = .006.
Accordingly, children are more likely to prefer a relatively poor agent compared to a richer one in their resource allocation decisions if they tend to evaluate prosocial behavior positively and antisocial behavior negatively in other protagonists. This finding suggests that preferential sharing with a poor recipient is grounded on normative understanding. Furthermore, the observation that children’s more favorable sharing with a poorer agent relates to a more extensive receptive vocabulary points to a cross-domain cognitive skill that is at work in the development of fairness. The results shed light on the mechanisms that drive the development of the conception of fairness in third party distribution decisions.

Authors

• Christina Maria Kellermann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
  Presenting Author

• Johannes Bullinger, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich

• Maria Mammen

• Markus Paulus, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München