Infants reason about deserving agents: A test with distributive actions

Surian, Luca; Franchin, Laura

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2017.08.009

Cited by 45 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Some of these people also condemned relatively higher offers, which may reflect the importance that people assign to retribution (e.g., that someone who behaved poorly in the past should not receive generosity but should be punished). Our principle component findings are in line with previous research showing that people account for deservingness of moral actors when sharing resources by either reciprocating (Meristo & Surian, 2013;Nowak & Sigmund, 1998;Surian & Franchin, 2017), or exceeding the past favour of their partner (Greenberg, 1982;Ule, Schram, Riedl, & Cason, 2009). Moreover, our findings that a portion of people found rewarding selfish actions to be morally inappropriate, are in line with previous research showing strong individual differences in punishment of selfishness (Crockett, Clark, Lieberman, Tabibnia, & Robbins, 2010;Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004;Fetchenhauer, Schlösser, Lotz, Baumert, & Gresser, 2011).…”

Section: Judgement Profiles Before and After Learning Relevant Contexsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…These include a tendency to return previous favours (reciprocity norm ;Diekmann, 2004;Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004), or a tendency to assign more to others than to oneself (generosity norm; Mandel, 2006;Shaw, 2013). If an actor needs to share with others who have a history of moral or immoral actions, they show a tendency to share proportionally to others' past moral behaviour (indirect reciprocity norm; Meristo & Surian, 2013;Nowak & Sigmund, 1998), or otherwise scale the outcomes to their perceived moral deservingness (Surian & Franchin, 2017).…”

Section: Context-independent and Context-dependent Fairness Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Moral judgements of fairness-related actions are flexibly updated to account for contextual information

Andrejević¹,

Feuerriegel²,

Turner³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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In everyday life we are constantly updating our moral judgements of people and actions as we learn new information. We developed a novel paradigm to investigate how people update their moral judgements of fairness-related actions upon receiving contextual information regarding the deservingness of the action recipient. Participants (N = 313) observed a variant of the dictator game, whereby a ‘Decision-maker’ was given 10 dollars and decided how much of this amount to share with another person termed the ‘Receiver’. Participants first made an initial, context-absent judgement of the Decision-maker’s offer to the Receiver, and then a subsequent judgement of the same offer after learning contextual information regarding the Receiver’s previous offer to another person (context-present judgement). This sequence was repeated for varying combinations of Decision-maker and Receiver offers. Functional Principle Component Analyses revealed that participants showed patterns of judgements across offers that were interpretable in relation to moral norms, but that these patterns varied across individuals. Participants who endorsed equal-split (5 dollar) offers in their context-absent judgements also endorsed offers made by Decision-makers that were similar to the previous offer made by the Receiver (i.e. indirectly reciprocal offers). Participants who endorsed high (>5 dollar) offers in context-absent judgements also endorsed Decision-maker offers that were more generous than those made by the Receiver. Our findings show that most participants flexibly switched from relying on commonly studied context-independent norms (generosity, equality), to relying on related, context-dependent norms (relative generosity, indirect reciprocity), as they successfully integrate contextual information. The paradigm we have developed also provides a novel framework for investigating how moral judgements evolve in real time as people learn more information about a given situation.

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Section: Judgement Profiles Before and After Learning Relevant Contexsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Context-independent and Context-dependent Fairness Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral judgements of fairness-related actions are flexibly updated to account for contextual information

Andrejević¹,

Feuerriegel²,

Turner³

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One possible explanation is that resources, or the lack thereof, signal reward or punishment, such that there is resistance against unequal outcomes in resource distribution where equal outcomes are a possibility, unless the recipient demonstrates a clear lack of deservingness through inadequacies in performance or culpable conduct. There is some support for this speculation (e.g., Kenward and Dahl, 2011 ; Baumard et al, 2012 ; Surian and Franchin, 2017 ). Another possible explanation is that the minimal group paradigm, which relies on novel and artificial groupings such as sticker colors, had failed to elicit group identification and related intergroup processes required for ingroup loyalty to be relevant.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Preschoolers Favor Their Ingroup When Resources Are Limited

2018

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The present study examined how 2- to 4-year-old preschoolers in Singapore (N = 202) balance fairness and ingroup loyalty in resource distribution. Specifically, we investigated whether children would enact fair distributions as defined by an equality rule, or show partiality toward their ingroup when distributing resources, and the conditions under which one distributive strategy may take precedence over the other. In Experiment 1, children distributed four different pairs of toys between two puppets. In the Group condition, one puppet was assigned to the same group as the child while the other puppet was assigned to a different group using colored stickers in the No Group condition, no group assignments were made. Children’s distributions were assessed for whether the toys were fairly (equally) distributed or unfairly (unequally) distributed in favor of either puppet. Experiment 2 was identical to the Group condition in Experiment 1, except that a third identical toy was introduced following the distribution of each toy pair. Distributions were separately assessed for whether the first two toys were fairly (equally) distributed or unfairly (unequally) distributed in favor of either puppet, and whether children distributed the third toy to the ingroup or outgroup puppet. Overall, the vast majority of children abided by an equality rule when resources were precisely enough to be shared between recipients, but distributed favorably to the ingroup member when there was limited resource availability. We found that fairness trumped ingroup loyalty except in resource distribution involving limited resources. Our results are consistent with findings from other resource distribution studies with preschoolers and similar studies measuring young infants’ expectations of distributive behaviors in third-party observations. Taken together, there is evidence suggesting stability in the development of knowledge to behavior in the subdomains of fairness and ingroup loyalty.

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“…At 15–24 months, infants prefer agents that distribute resources equally, rather than unequally (Geraci and Surian, 2011 ; Burns and Sommerville, 2014 ; Surian and Franchin, 2017a ) and by 9–10 months they expect resources to be distributed equally (Meristo et al, 2016 ; Ziv and Sommerville, 2017 ). Infants look longer when they see an agent distributing the available resources unequally rather than equally to similar recipients (Sloane et al, 2012 ; Sommerville et al, 2013 ), and by 24 months their expectations are guided by agents' merit and group membership (Sloane et al, 2012 ; Surian and Franchin, 2017b ; Bian et al, 2018 ) and are associated to their altruistic sharing of a preferred toy (Schmidt and Sommerville, 2011 ; Ziv and Sommerville, 2017 ; Sommerville, 2018 ). Infacts' reactions to distributive events are not due to perceptual factors or expectations about agents' affiliative behavior (Meristo et al, 2016 ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions

et al. 2018

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We investigated whether and how infants link the domains of harm, help and fairness. Fourteen-month-old infants were familiarized with a character that either helped or hindered another agent's attempts to reach the top of a hill. Then, in the test phase they saw the helper or the hinderer carrying out an equal or an unequal distribution toward two identical recipients. Infants who saw the helper performing an unequal distribution looked longer than those who saw the helper performing an equal distribution, whereas infants who saw the hinderer performing an unequal distribution looked equally long than those who saw the hinderer performing an equal distribution. These results suggest that infants linked the hindering actions to a diminished propensity for distributive fairness. This provides support for theories that posit an early emerging ability to attribute moral traits to agents and to generate socio-moral evaluations of their actions.RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS - Infants expect agents that previously helped another agent to perform egalitarian distributions, but they do not generate such expectation about agents that previously hindered another agent.- This ability to link hindering and distributive actions is important because it may help the development of reasoning about agents' stable moral traits.- Results provide support for recent theories on early social evaluation skills and they constraint theories on the acquisition of moral competence.

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Infants reason about deserving agents: A test with distributive actions

Cited by 45 publications

References 31 publications

Moral judgements of fairness-related actions are flexibly updated to account for contextual information

Moral judgements of fairness-related actions are flexibly updated to account for contextual information

Preschoolers Favor Their Ingroup When Resources Are Limited

Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions

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