How five-year-old children distribute rewards: Effects of the amount of reward and a crying face

Abstract

Five-year-old children were presented with two scenes in which one character made three stars and the other made nine stars. In one of the scenes, both characters' facial expressions were neutral (neutral face scene), and in the other scene the character who produced three stars had a crying face (crying face scene). Children distributed different numbers of rewards to the two characters: equal to (Middle-N), less than (Small-N), or more than (Large-N) the total number of stars in each scene. Then the children were asked for their reason after they distributed the rewards. It was found that (a) the participants' distributions depended on the total number of rewards but (b) not on the characters' facial expressions, and (c) the justifications of their distributions in the Middle-N condition were different between the scenes. These results suggest that the total number of rewards triggers an automatic distribution process, and that an ex post facto justification takes place when needed.

Preschoolers’ Distributive Justice When They Distribute Few Total Rewards in a Third‐Party Task

“…In condition Four, most participants distributed candies equally under both All and Partial instructions (both were 87.5%), as shown in Table . The All‐Four result is consistent with Tsutsu (, ), who found that most 5‐year‐old children conduct an Equality allocation when the rewards are limited to four. On the other hand, most participants (71.9%) in the present study conducted an Inequality allocation under the condition All‐Three, when following the All instruction, while the use of Inequality in condition Partial‐Three was reported by 40.7% of the participants.…”

“…Tsutsu () replicated the effect of the numbers of total rewards, and, furthermore, found that the effect remained even when a tearful facial expression of the lower performance character was encountered. Tsutsu () interpreted these results as being that the small number of total rewards elicits the form of automatic processing earlier proposed by Haidt ().…”

“…Tsutsu () replicated the effect of the numbers of total rewards, and, furthermore, found that the effect remained even when a tearful facial expression of the lower performance character was encountered. Tsutsu () interpreted these results as being that the small number of total rewards elicits the form of automatic processing earlier proposed by Haidt (). Since preschoolers can rapidly and accurately comprehend the number of stimuli ranging from 3 to 4 by subitizing (an automatic process: see Chi & Klahr, ; Starkey & Cooper, ), some automatic processing would be probable when there are few rewards.…”

“…Lucas, Wagner, and Chow () claimed, however, that distributive justice allocations are more troublesome for young children because they must consider contextual factors. The fundamental problem of fairness judgment in reward allocation is not a judgment of right or wrong of the recipients, but how allocators make a connection between the quantities of rewards and the performances to be rewarded (Tsutsu, ).…”

“…Accordingly, the experimental design employed was 2 (rewards: “Four” or “Three”) × 2 (instructions: All or Partial); this is a within‐participant design. A participant thus conducted four allocations, and this number of conditions is smaller than the six employed by Tsutsu (, ). Two characters are presented in a vignette story, and the characters are to be the recipients of these rewards.…”