When Is a Fair Distributor ‘Good’ for a Toddler?

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective good at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. Franchin, Savazzi, Neira-Gutierrez, & Surian (2019) investigated 20- and 30-month-olds’ knowledge of word ‘good’ and found that by 30 months toddlers map good to some socio-moral features, such as a helping disposition, but not to fairness in distributive actions. One limitation of this study was a heterogeneous set of stimuli and measurements between the two moral domains – helping/hindering events were videos whereas distributive events were presented with a puppet show. The present study wants to go beyond this limit and aims to test the replicability of Franchin et al. (2019) findings by using more homogeneous sets of stimuli.

Sixty toddlers participated to the study and were divided in three age groups: 15-month-olds (n = 13, 8 females), 20-month-olds (n = 19, 10 females), 30-month-olds (n = 28, 11 females). All participants were presented with 7 videos. Six Familiarization events started by showing alternatively an agent that distributed equally two resources to two recipients and an agent that distributed both resources to the same recipient. The events regarding the equal/unequal distributions were repeated for three times, with different types of resources (i.e., a feeding bottle, a strawberry, a muffin). Finally, a Test event started with a flashing red dot in the center of the screen and two adjacent walls. The two walls simultaneously opened, gradually unveiling the fair and unfair agent. A neutral voice said: ‘there is the good one… the good one’.

Independently from the age, after hearing the word ‘good’, all toddlers showed their first fixations equally distributed among the equal and unequal agent. For the 15 months group: 4 infants looked at the equal agent and 9 the unequal; for the 20 months: 10 infants looked at the equal and 9 the unequal; for the 30 months: 16 infants looked at the equal and 16 the unequal. In the three groups also the duration and the number of fixations did not differ between the equal and unequal agent.

In addition, at the end of the test event, infants were presented with a white board where there were the equal and the unequal shapes. The experimenter said to infants: “Pick the good one”. Likewise, for the manual choice task, no significant differences resulted in all the groups. For 15-month-olds: 7 infants picked the equal, 4 the unequal, 2 have not chosen; for 20-month-olds: 5 infants picked the equal, 7 the unequal, 7 have not chosen; for 30-month-olds: 17 infants picked the equal, 11 the unequal, 4 have not chosen.

These findings replicate what Franchin et al. (2019) found, highlining that, toddlers up to 30 months have not yet discovered that ‘good’ can be used also to refer to positive qualities in the domain of distributive fairness. The research question - when do children start to map the word ‘good’ to fairness distributive actions?- still remains open.

Authors

• Laura Franchin, University of Trento
  Presenting Author

• Luca Surian, University of Trento
  Non-Presenting Author