Children's Sense of Fairness as Equal Respect

• In Event: Beyond Resources: Fairness as Moral Regulation of Social Relationships

Abstract

In contexts of distributive justice, where participants are asked to allocate resources among different recipients, young children show a strong tendency to react negatively to, and even to pay a cost to reject unequal distributions. Across a number of studies and populations, children from the age of 4 onwards have been found to reject any distribution that favours one recipient over the other (McAuliffe et al, 2017). Indeed, 5-year-old children will go so far as to throw away an extra resource to maintain equality instead of taking it for themselves (Shaw & Olson, 2012). In other words, children show so-called inequity aversion.
However, when children are confronted with an unequal distribution in the context of procedural justice - where the unequal distribution resulted from an impartial procedure - children deem that result fair. For example, if one recipient received four resources and another recipient received only two resources, children explicitly judge that outcome as fair if it was determined by chance via an unbiased spinning wheel (Grocke, Rossano, & Tomasello, 2015). Importantly, children show this pattern of responses even if they end up personally disadvantaged.
What is going on? Does children's sense of fairness consist of a suite of different psychological mechanisms and processes? The current contribution develops a unifying theoretical framework to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings. The core of this framework is the argument that one and the same psychological mechanism - a desire for equal respect - underlies and explains children's reactions to various forms of distribution.
The starting point of the framework is the conviction that what matters most for evaluations of interpersonal actions are not the actions themselves but the evaluative attitudes reflected in those actions, what has been called the social meaning of the action. Children react differently to acts with the social meaning "we are equal" than to those that disrespect their status. They want, indeed expect, equal respect. As support for this argument, I discuss recent experimental evidence that: (i) the phenomenon of (resentful) moral protest, emerging at age 3, rests on partners' sense of equality and mutual respect; and (ii) the phenomenon of procedural fairness shows that children accept unequal distributions if the procedure gave everyone an equal chance.
In this talk, I will thus suggest that the evidence indicates that children are not primarily preoccupied with the material "stuff" in distributive contexts; they are concerned instead with the social meaning of the act of distribution, that is, whether they and others are being treated with equal respect. Any account that focuses only on the material stuff - no matter how nuanced - cannot capture this dimension of social meaning. Accounts that invoke a preference for equal distributions as the basic psychological mechanism - insofar as they focus mainly on the material stuff - are therefore descriptive only, not explanatory. The question is what underlies children's aversion to inequity, and the claim presented here is that the foundation of their aversion is not equality of resources per se, but rather equality of respect.

Author

• Jan Engelmann, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author