Perspective-dependent emotions shape children’s judgments of fairness

• In Event: The interplay of mental states and moral cognition

Abstract

As early as the preschool years, children link the emotions of victims to the morality of harmful actions (Arsenio & Kramer, 1992). For example, when told a story about one child stealing from another, children expect the victim to feel sad and use moral reasons to explain that sadness. Recent studies have explored the link between emotions and fairness finding that preschoolers rate those who receive less as more sad than those who receive more (LoBue et al, 2011; Paulus & Moore, 2015). By 5 years of age, children who rate a disadvantaged child as more sad also rate the unequal distribution as less fair (Stowe et al., 2022).

Importantly, children are not merely observers of unequal resource distributions (third party), they are also participants in them (first person). In the present study, we examine how a child’s perspective (first or third person) with regard to an unequal distribution shapes their fairness and emotion judgments. We expected that beliefs about the emotions of the disadvantaged child (the victim) would predict children’s fairness ratings and that personally experiencing disadvantage would have the strongest impact.

Participants were 134 4- to 7-year-old children (mostly White and middle- to high-SES), tested online. Participants watched as a coin flip was used to distribute 1 and 6 stickers between two children. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Third Party (3P): they witnessed two other children receive an unequal allocation; First Person Disadvantage (FP-Disadv): they received less than another child; or First Person Advantage (FP-Adv): they received more than another child. Participants were then asked to rate how fair the task was (1-4 scale) and how each recipient felt (1-5 scale).

We predicted (H1) that participants would give lower fairness ratings in FP-Disadv compared to 3P and FP-Adv. We also predicted (H2) that participants would feel worse in FP-Disadv than they believed others would feel (3P and FP-Adv). Lastly, we predicted (H3) that emotion ratings of the child who received less would predict fairness ratings with age. All predictions were registered on the OSF.

Linear regression models were used to evaluate all hypotheses. Confirming H1, participants in FP-Disadv rated the task as less fair than those in either 3P (β = 0.60, SE = .22, p < .01) or FP-Adv (β = 0.83, SE = .22, p < .01), which did not differ (see Figure 1). In contrast to H2, participants rated themselves as less sad in FP-Disadv compared to 3P (β = -0.75, SE = .25, p < .01) and FP-Adv (β = -0.85, SE = .24, p < .001). Finally, in line with H3, children’s ratings of the disadvantaged child’s emotions correlated with their fairness ratings, but only in the FP-Disadv condition (β = 0.53, SE = 0.11, t = 4.64, p < .001), see Figure 2.

Together, results demonstrate that both fairness judgments and emotion judgments vary by perspective, but that a strong link between the two may be driven by first-person experiences of disadvantage.

Authors

• Peter R. Blake, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Zoe Wilson, Boston University

• Lucy Stowe, University of California - Davis

• Rebecca Peretz-Lange, SUNY Purchase