Children develop a veil of fairness.

Abstract

Previous research suggests that children develop an increasing concern with fairness over the course of development. Research with adults suggests that the concern with fairness has at least 2 distinct components: a desire to be fair and a desire to signal to others that they are fair. We explore whether children’s developing concern with behaving fairly toward others may in part reflect a developing concern with appearing fair to others. In Experiments 1 and 2, most 6- to 8-year-old children behaved fairly toward others when an experimenter was aware of their choices; fewer children opted to behave fairly, however, when they could be unfair to others yet appear fair to the experimenter. In Experiment 3, we explored the development of this concern with appearing fair by using a wider age range (6- to 11-year-olds) and a different method. In this experiment, children chose how to assign a good or bad prize to themselves and another participant by either unilaterally deciding who would get each prize or using a fair procedure—flipping a coin in private. Older children were much more likely to flip the coin than younger children, yet were just as likely as younger children to assign themselves the good prize by reporting winning the coin flip more than chance would dictate. Overall, the results of these experiments suggest that as children grow older they become increasingly concerned with appearing fair to others, which may explain some of their increased tendency to behave fairly.

Parochialism in preschool boys' resource allocation

“…On the one hand, 3-4 year-olds distributed more stingily under conditions with high self-interest (mine), matching previous studies in which the resource belonged to the dictator (Benenson, Pascoe, & Radmore, 2007;Blake & Rand, 2010;Fehr et al, 2008). On the other hand, in the absence of personal ownership (not mine), 3-4 year-olds were more egalitarian, a pattern previously suggested to take place among children judging third-party distributions (Blake, McAuliffe, & Warneken, 2014;Smith, Blake, & Harris, 2013), or among 4 year olds in interdependent contexts such as cooperation, joint effort, or impression management (Kanngiesser & Warneken, 2012;Shaw et al, 2014;Tomasello & Vaish, 2013). Here we show that even in the absence of any previous interaction with an actual partner (e.g., cooperation), a mere understanding of ownership statuses provided a range of behavioral outcomes.…”

“…For instance, 3-and 4-year olds manifested biased distributions in favor of their gender-group (Dunham et al, 2011), 5-year olds distributed more resources towards an anonymous recipient when they were watched by in-group members (but not when watched by out-group ones) (Engelmann, Over, Herrmann, & Tomasello, 2013; see also Shaw et al, 2014), and 6-to 8-year olds distributed more positive stimuli to an in-group member and more negative stimuli to an out-group member, manifesting what Buttelmann & Bohm (2014), labeled 'in-group love' and 'out-group hate', respectively.…”

Restorative Justice in Children

“…As well, it would be important to address the role of signaling on part of the victim; children of the age of 18 months will show concern for others even in the absence of emotional cues [24], but requests at this age are important for eliciting sharing [27]. Furthermore, children might signal their role as enforcers [21]. To determine whether concern for victims motivates punishment is a universal part of a child's development, future studies could examine children in other cultures, since adults in different societies show patterns of third-party and altruistic punishment [28][29][30].…”

“…Spiteful motivations might have explained responses to unfairness, and, for loss, children might have been responding out of frustration (second party) and empathic concern (third party). One could speculate on other motives, such as punishing for the sake of reputation [21], a point that can be addressed in future studies. In the second experiment, 3-year-olds did not show a taste for removing rewards but preferred to restore objects to original owners.…”

Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically

“…These results suggest that people can view their actions as moral by providing evidence to themselves that they are fair (through the deployment of a theoretically unbiased coin flip), even when they then ignore the outcome of that coin flip to benefit themselves. Follow-up research on children aged 6 to 11 suggests that this pattern of behavior has a developmental trend (Shaw et al 2014). As children get older, they remain just as likely to assign themselves to the positive task: what changes with age is their likelihood of flipping the coin-that is, of attempting to gather evidence of their morality rather than actually behaving morally.…”