To be fair, generous, or selfish: The effect of relationship on Chinese children’s distributive allocation and procedural application

Abstract

Previous research has found that children’s sharing with others relies on fairness norms, but also varies according to their social relationships. The current study focuses on the conflict between fairness and relationship, exploring their impacts across two resource allocation contexts. We used a parallel work task to explore the effect of relationship with different recipients (friend, stranger, or disliked peer) on three allocation patterns (generous, fair, or selfish), when children directly allocated resources (distributive allocation), or applied different procedures to recipients (procedural application). Participants consisted of 123 Chinese children between the ages of 6 and 12. We found that in the distributive allocation context, in which participants directly decided the outcome, children primarily considered their relationship with recipients when dividing resources, not fairness. However, in the procedural application context, in which children could choose different allocation procedures for recipients, children primarily preferred fairness, regardless of social relationship. Moreover, when making distributive allocations, 6‐ to 8‐year‐olds were more selfish toward their disliked peers, whereas 9‐ to 12‐year‐olds tended to be more fair and generous toward their friends and strangers. These findings shed light on the link between social relationship and fairness within different allocation contexts among children of Chinese cultural background.

The Origins of Intergroup Resource Inequality Influence Children’s Decision to Perpetuate or Rectify Inequality

“…The difference is that previous studies have shown that Western children aged 3.5-11.5 years perpetuate resource inequality between two minimal groups (Olson et al, 2011). This may be because Chinese children pay more attention to the harmony of social relations than Western children and tend to allocate resources equally (Chai and He, 2017;Li et al, 2019). In addition to intergroup resource inequality without an explicit origin, intergroup inequality based on certain origins may have different effects on children's intergroup resource allocation (Olson et al, 2011;Shaw, 2016;Rizzo et al, 2020), which was examined in experiment 2.…”

“…This may be because children tend to allocate resources equally to maintain harmony when there is no obvious clue to be used in resource allocation, and ingroup preference becomes a motivation for younger children's allocation. Nevertheless, children of different ages are both more likely to make allocations based on different clues when there are some explicit bases for allocation (Li et al, 2019;Xiao et al, 2019).…”

“…When facing intergroup resource inequality with no explicit origin, Chinese children may be more concerned about equality in the amount of resources allocated (Chai and He, 2017;Li et al, 2019). Although younger children have a motivation for ingroup favoritism (Renno and Shutts, 2015;Yu et al, 2016), motivation for equality is stronger than their considerations about group factors for most children.…”

“…In some situations, young children can also fairly distribute resources between ingroup and outgroup members. For example, when the allocation method can be selected, young children choose to distribute fairly to ingroup and outgroup members by using a fair procedure (Li et al, 2019). When the merits of ingroup and outgroup members are different, young children can allocate equitably to ingroup and outgroup members based on their merits without showing a preference for the ingroup (Xiao et al, 2019).…”

Waste Aversion Reduces Inequity Aversion Among Chinese Children

“…We did not have strong predictions regarding the Best friend-Withhold condition. There is evidence suggesting Chinese and Western children act in a partial manner toward their own friends (i.e., direct friends) from about 4 to 12 years of age (Chen, Zhu, & Chen, 2013;Frederickson & Simmonds, 2008;Li, Curtis, Moore, Wang, & Zeng, 2019;Lu & Chang, 2016;Moore, 2009;Paulus, 2016;Paulus & Moore, 2014;Yu, Zhu, & Leslie, 2016). However, when recipients are described as the experimenter's friend (i.e., in-direct friend), 7-year-olds American avoid inequity and do not demonstrate a "partiality-bias" (Shaw & Olson, 2012).…”