The development of fairness: Perceptions, emotions, and actions

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Starting from a young age, children are sensitive to (un)equal distributions of resources. For example, even young children know that resources should be divided equally (Blake et al., 2014). Less is known about how children’s perceptions of and responses to unfairness develop. This symposium explores the development of fairness norms and, in particular, how children distinguish fairness norms from other norms and how they respond to unfairness. The first paper challenges the assumption that fairness is a clearly moral norm (pertaining to rights and welfare); the results show that 4-year-olds do not equate norms of distributional fairness with harm-based moral norms, pointing to the need for a more nuanced understanding of children’s developing perceptions of social norms. The second paper demonstrates that older children report experiencing more negative emotions to receiving more resources than their peers. The third paper investigates why children punish those who are unfair. It finds that children’s age impacts their punishment of inequality more than their own experiences of unfairness. The final paper gives a meta-analytic overview on the past 10 years of research on children’s aversion to unfairness. Together, these four papers bring together studies from multiple perspectives to provide nuanced insights into the development of children’s fairness concerns.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chairs

• Meltem Yucel, Duke University

• Amrisha Vaish, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

Individual Presentations

• Is fairness moral? - Presenting Author: Meltem Yucel, Duke University; Non-Presenting Author: Marissa Britt Drell; Non-Presenting Author: Vikram K Jaswal, University of Virginia - Charlottesville; Non-Presenting Author: Amrisha Vaish, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• The ontogeny of children’s social emotions in response to (un)fairness - Presenting Author: Stella Claire Gerdemann, Leipzig University; Non-Presenting Author: Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College; Non-Presenting Author: Peter R. Blake, Boston University; Non-Presenting Author: Daniel Haun, Max Planck Institute; Non-Presenting Author: Robert Hepach, University of Oxford

• Children’s motives for third-party punishment - Presenting Author: Young-eun Lee, University of Michigan; Non-Presenting Author: Felix Warneken, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• The Inequity Game: What we know ten years later - Presenting Author: Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College; Non-Presenting Author: Peter R. Blake, Boston University