3-166 - The Normative Basis of Children's Resource Allocations: Novel Perspectives

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Disputes over resources constitute a majority of conflicts in early childhood, and understanding the norms pertaining to the distribution of resources is a critical component of children’s social and moral development. Throughout childhood, children acquire a normative understanding of multiple social and moral concerns that govern how resources ought to be distributed. This symposium presents novel empirical evidence from international and diverse perspectives, utilizing a variety of experimental methodologies, demonstrating several central normative influences on resource allocation decisions throughout childhood.
The first paper investigates 3- to 6-year-old German children’s emerging understanding of reciprocity as a normative concern in resource allocation contexts. With age, children differentially evaluated and protested against non-reciprocators, stingy reciprocators, and generous reciprocators, revealing the emerging normative expectation of reciprocity. The second paper reports on ethnically diverse U.S. 3- to 8-year-old children’s adherence to, and predictions of adherence to, norms regarding equal allocation of resources in both passive (sharing with others) and active (taking from others) contexts. Children’s allocations and predictions of their allocations differed across sharing and taking contexts. The third paper examines whether 5-year-old German children view agreed-upon prosocial and selfish sharing norms as normatively binding. Children protested against others who violated prosocial, but not selfish, sharing norms, indicating an understanding that prosocial sharing norms are binding once agreed-upon. The final paper presents research from three studies demonstrating ethnically diverse U.S. 3- to 11-year-old children’s developing ability to coordinate moral concerns for fairness with conventional concerns for group membership, loyalty, and stereotypes in resource allocation contexts.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Michael T Rizzo, University of Maryland

Individual Presentations

• Normative Understanding of Reciprocity in Preschoolers - Presenting Author: Monika Wörle, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Markus Paulus, University of Munich

• The Norm of Not Taking is Stronger than the Norm of Equal Division when Children Allocate Resources - Presenting Author: Craig E. Smith, University of Michigan

• Preschoolers Enforce Agreed-Upon Prosocial, but Not Selfish, Sharing Norms - Presenting Author: Julia Petra Friedrich, LMU Munich; Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich

• Children's Understanding of Moral and Conventional Norms When Allocating Resources - Presenting Author: Michael T Rizzo, University of Maryland; Laura Elenbaas, University of Maryland; Melanie Killen, University of Maryland, College Park