1-083 - To share equally or not to share equally: The early ontogeny of fairness.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Infants and young children often opt for equality, but several factors can lead to unequal resource distribution. We explore when and how infants and children deviate from equality in their sharing and expectations.
The first paper investigated 17-month-olds’ reactions to resource distribution. They found that although infants showed increased looking time when distributors share unequally among two equally dominant recipients, infants looked longer when a distributor shares equally between a dominant and submissive recipient. This suggests that infants use dominance to predict resource distribution. The next paper examined how 4- to 7-year-olds divide resources between equally and unequally deserving recipients and how children’s cognitive control influences their equal sharing behavior. They found that children were more likely to share unequally when the recipients differed in merit and that decisions to pursue equal sharing were related to younger children’s cognitive control. The third paper examined the emergence of partiality aversion in children: finding that by age 7 children begin to recognize that it is fair for the self to give the big piece to someone else and keep the small piece for the self, but not vice versa. The final paper compares children’s actual sharing behavior to their expectations of similar others’ sharing. It finds that younger children are less likely to be fair than older children, but are also much more likely to think that similar others will be fair. These papers document the emergence and development of abilities to navigate complex decisions about how to share with others.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Alex Shaw, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Infants Adjust their Expectations about Resource Distributions Depending on Recipient Status - Presenting Author: Elizabeth Ake, University of Washington; Jessica A Sommerville, University of Washington

• Investigating the relationship between cognitive control and fairness - Presenting Author: Nadia Chernyak, Boston University; Peter R Blake, Boston University

• The Development of Inequity Aversion: Understanding When (and Why) People Give Others the Bigger Piece of the Pie - Presenting Author: Alex Shaw, University of Chicago; Shoham Choshen-Hillel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Eugene Caruso, University of Chicago Booth

• Developing expectations of third-party fairness - Presenting Author: Jonathan Phillips, Harvard University; Paul Bloom, Yale University