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• Both children and adults share selectively. • We examined when people believe one deserves to have more resources than others. • All age groups believed merit-based resources are more deserved than windfall resources. • Adults believed resources acquired from family is more deserved than windfall resources. • Children believed resources acquired from family is as deserved as windfall resources. Although sharing is often considered a virtuous behavior, individuals rarely share all their extra resources with those less fortunate. The current research investigated conditions under which children believe that someone who has more resources deserves to keep them rather than address an inequality. Specifically, we contrasted resources acquired via merit, windfall, and parental allocations. Across two studies, we showed 5- and 6-year-old children (n = 59), 8- and 9-year-old children (n = 120), and adults (n = 163) three scenarios in which one person acquired more resources than the other due to luck, due to merit, or because that person's parents gave him or her more, and we asked whether that person should share these resources or keep all of them. Results suggested that adults differentiated both the family resource and the merit conditions from the windfall allocation, believing that an agent deserves to keep the extra resources more when they are acquired through one's family or due to merit. However, children did not differentiate family resources from windfall, although they were more likely to believe that individuals deserve to keep their extra resources when they were acquired through merit. The type of the resource (i.e., money vs. balls) did not affect participants' sharing decisions. Overall, these findings suggest that over development the resources acquired from one's family come to be seen as more deserved than windfall resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 4–8-year-olds judged a series of third-party resource allocation trials. • Children saw trials in two contexts: merit (one character worked harder) and equality. • Younger kids showed numerically-sensitive fairness in both contexts. • Older children were more tolerant of extreme inequalities in the merit context. • Results are discussed with reference to the downsides of acquiring meritocracy beliefs. One persistent and pernicious feature of outstanding social inequality is that even relatively extreme forms of inequality can be justified with reference to merit-based considerations. One key feature of fairness with respect to resource allocation is that it is numerically sensitive; greater (more extreme) inequalities are generally seen as less fair than less extreme ones. This work sought to document the emergence of numerically sensitive fairness in children aged 4 to 8 years. A total of 81 4- to 8-year-olds completed a series of within-participants fairness judgment trials in which they observed two characters receive either equitable or inequitable shares of resources—ranging from 50/50 (completely fair) to 0/100 (completely unfair)—in two contexts: one in which the two characters were described as working the same amount (equality context) and one in which one character was described as working harder than the other character (merit context). Children of all ages showed numerically sensitive fairness in the equality context. However, whereas younger children continued to show numerically sensitive fairness in the merit context, older children approved even relatively extreme inequalities when one person was described as working harder. This effect emerged with age, suggesting a double-edged sword to acquiring beliefs in merit-based fairness; as children get older, they may begin to accept even relatively extreme forms of inequality when presented in a merit context. Results are discussed with respect to the acquisition of meritocracy as a normative belief of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children rated inequitable and unmeritorious allocations more negatively with age. • Children did not evaluate equity- and merit-based allocations more positively. • Over the course of early childhood, children increasingly supported equality. This study examined young children's judgments of resource distributions that either adhered to or diverged from principles of equality, equity, or merit in straightforward, peer-based scenarios. The sample comprised 192 ethnically and socioeconomically diverse 3- to 8-year-olds. Between 3 and 8 years of age, children evaluated inequitable and anti-meritorious allocations more negatively but did not evaluate equitable and meritorious allocations more positively. Rather, between 3 and 8 years, children increasingly supported equality. Highlighting an important but often overlooked developmental distinction, these results suggest that young children are increasingly against unfairness, but do not always endorse the most complex forms of distributive fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children increase sharing to collaborators after achieving a joint concrete goal. • Increased sharing to collaborators is not restricted to collaboratively earned resources. • Children show an increase in equal sharing with collaboratively earned resources. • Social play did not effect sharing, highlighting the importance of a concrete goal. Research has shown that preschoolers increase equal sharing after collaborating to earn resources, suggesting that collaboration may be an important context for the development of fairness. The current study explored the influence of specific components of collaborative interactions to better understand the social cognitive foundations of this precocious increase in equal sharing. The effects of three forms of collaborative interaction on children's sharing were compared: collaborating toward a joint concrete goal of earning resources that could subsequently be shared, collaborating toward a joint concrete goal without earning resources, and playing a social game without earning resources. Replicating previous work, a significant increase in the proportion of equal sharing was observed when children shared collaboratively earned resources. Extending these findings, collaboration toward a concrete goal resulted in increased sharing regardless of whether resources were earned collaboratively or given outside of the collaborative context. Social play alone was not found to influence children's sharing, highlighting the importance of the context of collaboration toward a concrete goal to increase children's sharing. Overall, these findings suggest that collaborating toward a shared concrete goal fosters a general increase in prosociality that extends beyond the context of sharing collaboratively earned resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• With interest involved, self-disadvantageous inequity in preschoolers rose with age. • The improvement of inhibitory control explained this developmental trajectory. • Better theory of mind was associated with self-disadvantaging tendency. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between preschoolers' cognitive abilities and their fairness-related allocation behaviors in a dilemma of equity–efficiency conflict. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 99) decided how to allocate five reward bells. In the first-party condition, preschoolers were asked to choose among giving more to self (self-advantageous inequity), wasting one bell (equity), or giving more to other (self-disadvantageous inequity); in the third-party condition, they chose either to allocate the extra bell to one of two equally deserving recipients or to waste it. Results showed that, compared with the pattern of decision in the third-party condition, preschoolers in the first-party condition were more likely to give the extra bell to other (self-disadvantaging behaviors) and that age, inhibitory control (IC), and theory of mind were positively correlated with their self-disadvantaging choices, but only IC mediated the relationship between age and self-disadvantaging behaviors. Experiment 2 (N = 41) showed that IC still predicted preschoolers' self-disadvantaging behaviors when they could choose only between equity and disadvantageous inequity. These results suggested that IC played a critical role in the implementation of self-disadvantaging behaviors when this required the control over selfishness and envy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • This study removes confound of effort and outcome in merit-based allocation. • Children prioritized effort over outcome in distributive decisions. • Children preferred to work with effort-focused peer over outcome-focused peer. Abstract How individuals determine what is fair and just when allocating resources is a fundamental aspect of moral development. Decisions about fairness involve considerations such as merit, which includes effort (one's own exertion to achieve a goal) and outcome (one's product). Previous research has described merit in terms of both effort and outcome (e.g., a meritorious individual is both hard-working and productive). Crucially, no research has documented whether children give priority to being hard-working (high effort) or to being productive (high outcome or product) when allocating resources. This gap in the literature obfuscates two constructs that reflect how individuals allocate resources. The current study examined this process by which children (3- to 10-year-olds, N = 100; M age = 7.27 years, SD = 2.39) weighed these two different aspects of merit in their fairness decisions in several situations where levels of effort and outcome were varied. When there was a discrepancy between effort and outcome, children increasingly prioritized effort over outcome with age and allocated more resources to hard-working peers than to productive peers. Effort and outcome were also examined. In situations where only effort varied (i.e., outcome was controlled), with age children were more likely to incorporate effort into their fairness decisions; however, in situations where only outcome varied (i.e., effort was controlled), with age children were less likely to incorporate effort into their fairness decisions. Taken together, the findings suggest that as children get older, they increasingly focus on effort of individuals rather than on their productivity when distributing resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Combined ethnography and experimental tests of fairness for Chinese children. • Tested 8–9 year olds in two schools with different norms and practices. • Children reject disadvantageous and advantageous inequality in both schools. • Different social factors shape advantageous inequality aversion in the schools. Abstract Recent research has shown that children's sense of fairness is shaped in part by cultural practices, values, and norms. However, the specific social factors that motivate children's fairness decisions remain poorly understood. The current study combined an ethnographic approach with experimental tests of fairness (the Inequity Game) in two Chinese schools with qualitatively different practices and norms. In the "University school," children received explicit moral instruction on fairness reinforced by adults when supervising children's activities. By contrast, in the "Community school," children received less formal moral education and little adult supervision during play time, but norms of cooperation and fairness emerged through informal interactions with peers and other members of the community. Contrary to our predictions, children in both schools (N = 66) rejected both disadvantageous and advantageous allocations of resources in the test trials. However, in the very first practice trials, children from the Community school tended to reject all inequalities, whereas children from the University school tended to accept inequalities. We draw on the ethnographies of the schools to interpret these results, concluding that, despite the similarities in the experimental results, different motivations and social factors likely underlie the rejection of inequality in the two schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults expect distributive justice—that rewards are distributed according to the principles of equality and equity. Previous research has demonstrated that preschool-aged children are sensitive to distributive justice, yet the age at which these sensitivities emerge remains unknown. The current research demonstrates that 17-month-old infants ( N  = 84) expect individuals to distribute shared resources based on the amount of work each partner contributed to attain the resources. These findings provide evidence that sensitivity to two principles of distributive justice, equity and equality, emerges much earlier than has previously been suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People accept an unequal distribution of resources if they judge that the decision-making process was fair. In this study, 3- and 5-year-old children played an allocation game with two puppets. The puppets decided against a fair distribution in all conditions, but they allowed children to have various degrees of participation in the decision-making process. Children of both ages protested less when they were first asked to agree with the puppets’ decision compared with when there was no agreement. When ignored, the younger children protested less than the older children—perhaps because they did not expect to have a say in the process—whereas they protested more when they were given an opportunity to voice their opinion—perhaps because their stated opinion was ignored. These results suggest that during the preschool years, children begin to expect to be asked for their opinion in a decision, and they accept disadvantageous decisions if they feel that they have had a voice in the decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that both adults and children tend to favor members of their own group and expect reciprocity of such in-group privilege. If a person is treated unfairly by an in-group member, a conflict arises between the tendency of in-group favoritism and the desire to punish violators of in-group norms. How do children solve the conflict at different points in development? We compared how preschoolers punished in-group and out-group members (marked by color preference) for selfishness in the Ultimatum Game. We found that (a) 3- to 6-year-old Chinese children rejected selfish allocations more often than fair ones, showing a robust preference for fairness; (b) 3- and 4-year-olds showed no group differences in their punishment behavior, suggesting that second-party punishment of selfishness is not biased during early childhood; (c) 5- and 6-year-old girls were more likely to punish selfishness of in-groups than of out-groups, illuminating an early sign of maintaining group-based fairness norms even at a personal cost; and (d) 5- and 6-year-old boys, however, punished in-groups and out-groups equally often and punished out-groups more often than did girls. These age and gender differences in children’s punishment imply that socialization may play an important role in showing group bias when enforcing fairness norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated preschool children’s normative expectations about the fair distribution of resources. We examined whether preschool children have a norm of charity, that is, a norm to give more to poor individuals than to wealthy individuals. To this end, we presented 3- to 6-year-olds ( N = 81) with two different resource allocation situations. In one situation, an agent complied with a norm of charity by allocating more resources to a poor recipient than to a rich recipient. In the other situation, a different agent violated the norm by allocating more resources to a wealthy recipient. We assessed (a) children’s verbal protest and affirmation during the resource allocation situations, (b) their punishing and rewarding behavior toward the agents, and (c) their evaluations of the agents’ behavior. The results show that older (5- and 6-year-old) preschool children enforced norm-compliant behavior and protested against the norm violation of the protagonist who gave more items to the wealthy recipient, but this was not the case in younger preschool children. These findings demonstrate that older preschool children consider charity as a norm and enforce this norm toward third parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• German preschool and school children collaborated with peer or worked individually for acquiring resource containers. • Children decided in private whether to secretly donate some of their resources to the peer when the peer's container was empty. • Children donated more resources after collaboration than individual work. • Children generally consider the peer's work effort when making sharing decision, independently of collaboration. • Younger children shared more after collaboration even when the partner had worked with less effort. Young children share equally when they acquire resources through collaboration with a partner, yet it is unclear whether they do so because in such contexts resources are encountered as common and distributed in front of the recipient or because collaboration promotes a sense of work-based fairness. In the current studies, 5- and 8-year-old children from Germany (N = 193) acquired resources either by working individually alongside or by collaborating with a peer. After finding out that the partner's container was empty, they decided in private whether they wanted to donate some resources to the peer. When both partners had worked with equal efforts (Study 1), children shared more after collaboration than after individual work. When one partner had worked with much more effort than the other (Study 2), children shared more with a harder-working partner than with a less-working partner independently of whether they had collaborated or worked individually. Younger children were more generous than older children, in particular after collaboration. These findings support the view that collaboration promotes a genuine sense of fairness in young children, but they also indicate that merit-based notions of fairness in the context of work may develop independently of collaboration, at least by the beginning of middle childhood and in Western societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the development of fairness has become a topic of wide interest, little is known about the correlates and factors that relate to the early ontogeny of fairness-related decision making in preschoolers. The current study assessed 5-year-old children’s consideration of existing inequalities in their resource allocation decisions, that is, their tendency to allocate more resources to poor others than to rich others. In addition, children’s prosocial responding toward others in pain, the amount of their social interaction experiences, and their social-cognitive abilities were assessed. The results provide evidence that children’s early social interaction experiences and empathy-based prosocial responding relate to their fairness-related decision making, supporting a relational systems approach to early prosocial and moral development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children endorse norms of fairness but rarely act on them. We investigated whether a failure of behavioral control can partially explain why children do not share more generously than they do. We experimentally manipulated behavioral control and observed its effects on sharing in 120 children aged 6–9 years of age. Using a between-participants design, we presented children with stories in which a protagonist either exerted behavioral control in an unrelated context or not. Following this, children engaged in a sharing task. We found that children who had been read a story promoting behavioral control shared more than children who had been read a neutral story. This effect held over two different types of instruction. Perceptions of fairness, on the other hand, were identical across conditions. These findings speak to the importance of behavioral control in prosocial behavior, and specifically sharing, during middle childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The age at which young children show an aversion to inequitable resource distributions, especially those favoring themselves, is unclear. It is also unclear whether great apes, as humans’ nearest evolutionary relatives, have an aversion to inequitable resource distributions at all. Using a common methodology across species and child ages, the current two studies found that 3- and 4-year-old children ( N = 64) not only objected when they received less than a collaborative partner but also sacrificed to equalize when they received more. They did neither of these things in a nonsocial situation, demonstrating the fundamental role of social comparison. In contrast, chimpanzees ( N = 9) showed no aversion to inequitable distributions, only a concern for maximizing their own resources, with no differences between social and nonsocial conditions. These results underscore the unique importance for humans, even early in ontogeny, for treating others fairly, presumably as a way of becoming a cooperative member of one’s cultural group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Nine-month-olds have expect a bystander to punish to unfair distributors and reward fair distributors. • These results reveal early-emerging expectations about punshments and rewards in third-party contexts. • These findings are consistent with the view that the principle of fairness is an evolved adaptation. Rewarding individuals who distribute resources fairly and punishing those who distribute resources unfairly may be very important actions for fostering cooperation. This study investigated whether 9-month-olds have some expectations concerning punishments and rewards that follow distributive actions. Infants were shown simple animations and were tested using the violation-of-expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when they saw a bystander delivering a corporal punishment to a 'fair distributor,' who distributed some windfall resources equally to the possible recipients, rather than to an 'unfair distributor,' who distributed the resources unequally. This pattern of looking times was reversed when, in Experiment 2, punishments were replaced with rewards. These findings suggest an early emergence of expectations about punishing and rewarding actions in third-party contexts, and they help to evaluate competing claims about the origins of a sense of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unfairness in resource allocation situations can present itself in two ways, with one person receiving either less or more than another person. Research suggests that aversion to situations of disadvantageous inequality (DI), in which a child receives less than a peer, develops differently from aversion to advantageous inequality (AI), in which a child receives more than a partner. However, little is known about how AI aversion and DI aversion develop as well as how the relationship between the two may change over time. In this short-term longitudinal study, two forms of AI and DI (in which equality was either costly or not costly) were examined. Using a forced choice resource allocation task, children’s decision making was compared across three time points: 4.5, 5.0, and 5.5 years of age. In both AI and DI situations, costly and no-cost trials were correlated at each time point, establishing construct validity within trial types. A positive relationship (indicating a preference for fairness) was observed between AI and DI at Time 1, whereas no relationships were observed later in development. Finally, correlations across all time points were observed in AI trials and grew stronger with age, whereas only one relationship was observed (between Time 1 and Time 2) in DI trials. Taken together, these results suggest that decision making in situations of AI and DI develops differently and that the relationship between them changes with age. Importantly, this research suggests that motivations for fairness and equality differ depending on context, and an undifferentiated aversion to inequality is not primarily guiding decision making throughout childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent research has shown that children are sensitive to basic principles of fair distribution of resources much earlier than previously assumed. Under appropriate circumstances, toddlers and sometimes even infants both expect that others will follow principles of equal distribution of resources and do so themselves. But from these findings it remains unclear whether young children understand and follow such principles of fairness as normative rules. The current study tested for such an understanding of the normative force of principles of resource distribution with a novel method. In the study, 3- and 5-year-olds witnessed how a (puppet) agent distributed resources jointly earned by herself and a fellow agent in equal or unequal ways. In one condition, the child herself or himself was this fellow agent, and in another condition it was an unrelated third party. Children spontaneously protested frequently against unfair distributions both when they themselves were affected and when another third party was affected (and never did so after fair distributions), with 5-year-olds doing so in more explicitly normative terms than 3-year-olds. These findings suggest that young children indeed understand principles of fair distribution as normatively binding regardless of whether they are personally affected or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ultimatum game is commonly used to explore fairness in adults in bargaining situations. Although the changes in responses that occur during development have been investigated in children, the results have been mixed. Whereas some studies show that proposers offer more when they grow older, others indicate the opposite. Moreover, these studies are outcome-based and leave intentions out of the scene, although intentions play a relevant role in daily life. The mini-ultimatum game offers the opportunity to test both outcomes and intentions, but one major obstacle for accurately pinpointing developmental transitions in strategic behavior and inequity aversion so far has been the multiple confounds that have plagued previous studies, including different methods, small sample sizes, and reduced age differences. We administered an anonymous direct-method one-shot mini-ultimatum game to 478 6- and 10-year-old children. Strategic behavior was present at 10 years of age; older participants matched more accurately what responders would accept than younger participants. However, this was true only for older girls. No sex differences were detected in younger children. No age group seemed to consider the proposer’s intentions given that the rejections of the default option were not significant across conditions. Both disadvantageous and advantageous inequity aversions were present in 6-year-olds. However, older children exhibited significantly more disadvantageous inequity aversion than younger children. This contrast made the pattern of rejection of 6-year-olds look more similar to the pattern of rejection found in adults. No sex differences were found in responders’ behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children are often considered “selfish” with resources because they are reluctant to give up things already in their possession (e.g., as in dictator games). In the current two studies, we presented pairs of 18- and 24-month-old toddlers with various situations involving resources that no one possessed ahead of time. We observed very few instances of individuals attempting to monopolize the resources; rather, the pair peaceably divided them such that each child got something. Equal divisions—even involving one child sacrificing his or her own resources to establish equality—were especially pronounced when children were acting together jointly even in the absence of active collaboration. Children’s divisions were also influenced by cues to ownership such as a spatial pre-division of resources and resources marked by color (and originally spatially associated with one individual). These results suggest that young children are not selfish, but instead rather generous, with resources when they are dividing them among themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it is not possible to distribute resources equitably to everyone, people look for an equitable or just procedure. In the current study, we investigated young children’s sense of procedural justice. We tested 32 triads of 5-year-olds in a new resource allocation game. Triads were confronted with three unequal reward packages and then agreed on a procedure to allocate them among themselves. To allocate the rewards, they needed to use a “wheel of fortune.” Half of the groups played with a fair wheel (where each child had an equal chance of obtaining each reward package), and the other half played with an unfair wheel. We analyzed children’s interactions when using the wheel and conducted an interview with each child after the game was over. Children using the unfair wheel often decided to change the rules of the game, and they also rated it as an unfair procedure in the interview. In contrast, children who played with the fair wheel were mostly accepting of both the outcome and the procedure. Overall, we found that children as young as preschool age are already sensitive not only to distributive justice but to procedural justice as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children consider recipients' responses when performing costly third-party punishment. • Children punish more when the recipient gives negative responses than no response. • Six-year-olds show third-party punishment only when the recipient respond negatively. Third-party punishment promotes cooperation by deterring opportunistic behaviors. Even children are willing to pay a cost to implement third-party punishment of unfair behavior. Whether in judicial practice or in daily third-party punishment, people take recipients' feelings into account out of restorative motives. Restorative motives pay attention to both the offenders and the victims and are committed to best repairing harm. This work examined whether children adopt restorative motives by considering recipients' responses when punishing unfair dividers. Participants (N = 128) were 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old Chinese children. Children were shown allocations proposed among a divider and a recipient with response (positive vs. negative) or without response and were asked to accept or pay a cost to reject the allocation. Two experiments indicated that costly third-party punishment increased with age. Furthermore, children took recipients' responses into consideration, with negative responses prompting children to punish more. These findings show that children adopted a restorative view when implementing costly third-party punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work showed the presence of strong forms of inequity aversion in young children. When presented with an uneven number of items, children would rather tend to throw one item away than to distribute them unequally between two anonymous others. The current study examined whether or not this pattern is a universal part of typical development by investigating 6- and 7-year-old Ugandan children. Results revealed that the Ugandan children, in contrast to their U.S. peers, tended to distribute the resources unequally rather than to throw the remaining resource away. This points to cross-cultural differences in the development of children’s fairness-related decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examined the development of fairness behavior and tested whether children's fair choices are fast and intuitive or slow and deliberate. Reaction times were measured while 4- to 9-year-olds (N = 94, 49 girls, 84.6% White) completed a novel social decision-making task contrasting fair choices with selfish choices. Fairness behavior increased during childhood, shifting from predominantly selfish choices among young children to fair choices by 7 years of age. Moreover, young children's fair choices were slow and deliberate, whereas reaction times did not predict older children's choices. These findings contrast with adults' intuitive cooperation and point to protracted development and learning of cooperative decision making in fairness contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] First paper to investigate the connection between distributive and procedural justice. [•] Finds that children pick impartial procedures over partial ones. [•] Children willingly use impartial procedures even when they create inequality. [•] Finds that children avoid partial procedures more often as they get older. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Pairs of 5-year-olds played a mini-ultimatum game with unfair candy distributions. [•] Responders rejected disadvantageous offers when 50/50 was the alternative. [•] Responders were not sensitive to proposers’ intentions or other unfair outcomes. [•] Proposers showed a poor understanding of what their partners would find acceptable. [•] Preschool children seem to understand “fair=equal”. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Children often make ingroup favoring choices when choosing procedures. • Younger children choose ingroup favoring procedures more consistently. • Reputational concerns may lead to fairer procedure choices in public than private. Research has shown that both ingroup bias and concern for procedural justice emerge early in development; however, these concerns can conflict. We investigated whether 6- to 8-year-old children are more influenced by procedural justice versus ingroup favoritism in a resource allocation task. In our first study, children played a novel spinner game in which they chose among fair, ingroup favoring, and outgroup favoring procedures to decide whether a resource would go to an unfamiliar ingroup or outgroup recipient. We found that 6- to 8-year-olds overall chose ingroup favoring procedures. However, this tendency decreased with age; whereas younger children were more likely to select procedures that were advantageous to their ingroup, older children (7- and 8-year-olds) mostly chose fair procedures. Our second study investigated the motivations underpinning children's choices by testing whether children's fair procedure choices were in part driven by a desire to appear fair. Here we varied whether children made procedure choices in public, allowing them to manage their reputation, versus in private, where reputational concerns should not guide their choices. We found that from 6 to 8 years of age children chose ingroup favoring procedures and that this tendency was slightly stronger when choosing in private. Taken together, our research suggests that ingroup favoritism often trumps procedural justice in resource allocation tasks, especially for younger children and especially when reputation is not in play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Unintentional unfair and fair advantages judged more negatively when created by out-group member. • Intentional rule violations were viewed equally negatively by in-group and out-group members. • Older children judged fair advantages as better than unfair advantages, regardless of their group. • Older children focused on intentions while younger focused on the cost/benefit to their group. Unfair advantages can be created either intentionally (e.g., cheating) or unintentionally (e.g., unintended benefit). Little is known regarding how children evaluate different types of advantages in situations where group identity and group membership are made salient. To investigate how children's group identity influences their evaluations and attribution of intentions in intergroup contexts, children were presented with three hypothetical advantages (unintentionally unfair, intentionally unfair, and fair) in a competitive context created by either an in-group member or an out-group member. Children (N = 120) were 4–6 years of age (n = 59; M age = 5.29 years) and 7–10 years of age (n = 61; M age = 8.34 years), including 64 girls and 56 boys. Participants were 67% European American, 18% African American, 11% Asian American, and 4% Hispanic. All participants were assigned to one of two teams in a contest in order to create an in-group/out-group manipulation prior to their evaluation of the actions. Out-group members viewed unintentional unfair and fair advantages as less acceptable than in-group members, but in-group and out-group members were equally negative in their assessment of an intentional transgression. When reasoning about unintentional and intentional unfair advantages, older children referenced the intentions of the advantage creator to justify their decisions more than younger children, whereas younger children reasoned about the impact of the behavior on their team more than older children. These novel findings shed light on developmental and social factors influencing children's understanding of fairness and intentionality in everyday contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: To investigate whether preschool children would involve third parties in dyadic sharing situations, we created unequal sharing situations in which one agent had no resources and a child participant and a third-party individual had unequal resources. We analyzed children’s tendency to share with the indigent agent and to involve the wealthy agent, whereas the indigent agent elicited sharing from them by means of progressive levels of request. The results showed that 5-year-olds involved the third party to a greater extent than 3.5-year-olds when they had fewer resources than the third party (Experiment 1). Yet, when 5-year-olds had the largest amount of resources, they were less likely to involve a third party but more likely to share themselves (Experiment 2). This study provides the first evidence that the tendency to involve third-party individuals in resource allocation situations develops at the preschool age and that it is based on fairness considerations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that in situations where resources have been acquired collaboratively, children at around 3years of age share mostly equally. We investigated 3-year-olds’ sharing behavior with a collaborating partner and a free-riding partner who explicitly expressed her preference not to collaborate. Children shared more equally with the collaborating partner than with the free rider. These results suggest that young children are sensitive to the contributions made by others to a collaborative effort (and possibly their reasons for not collaborating) and distribute resources accordingly. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The purpose of the current study was to examine the role of theory of mind in fairness-related behavior in preschoolers and to introduce a tool for examining fairness-related behavior in children. A total of 68 preschoolers played the Ultimatum Game in a face-to-face setting. Acquisition of theory of mind was defined as the understanding of false beliefs using the Sally-Anne task. The results showed that preschoolers who had acquired theory of mind proposed higher mean offers than children who had not acquired theory of mind. These findings imply that the ability to infer the mental states of others plays an important role in fairness-related behavior. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The development of fairness considerations in decision making is not well understood. Here we tested the hypothesis that increased understanding of intentionality during adolescence underlies increased fairness considerations in social decision making. We conducted three experiments using an adapted version of the Ultimatum Game with participants during four stages of adolescence: 9, 12, 15, and 18years of age. Participants made or evaluated monetary offers, and we manipulated the intentionality context of offers. Results show that strategic thinking is already present at 9years of age. There was no age difference in fairness of offers when the responder could not reject an offer (Experiment 1), but when they could reject an offer there was an age-related increase in taking into account the perspective and intentionality of other players when making offers (Experiment 2) and evaluating offers (Experiment 3). Taken together, the results demonstrate a linear developmental transition in fairness considerations that may have important implications for our understanding of social interactions during adolescence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Children increase sharing to collaborators after achieving a joint concrete goal. • Increased sharing to collaborators is not extended to earned resources. • Social play did not result in increased sharing. • The influence of collaboration on sharing is sensitive to early sociocultural experience. Research has shown that preschoolers developing in Western societies increase sharing after collaborating to earn resources, suggesting that collaboration is an important context for the development of fairness. The current study sought to explore the influence of collaboration on sharing among young children (N = 132, 3–6 years of age) developing in rural India, a population that shows an increased sensitivity to fairness after collaboration among older children. The effect of three forms of social interaction on children's sharing were compared: collaborating toward a joint concrete goal of earning resources that could subsequently be shared, collaborating toward a joint concrete goal without earning resources, and playing a social game without earning resources. The only context where children increased sharing was after collaborating toward a joint concrete goal without earning resources. Overall, these findings suggest that increased sharing between collaborators may show greater contextual sensitivity and influence of early sociocultural experience than has been previously understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Is 4- to 8-year-old children's helping influenced by other people's competence? • With age, children were more likely to provide more help to incompetent targets. • Four-year-old children did not help incompetent targets more. • Four-year-old children said incompetent targets needed more help. • Young children do not deliver more help to those who more help. When and how other people's needs influence children's helping is poorly understood. Here we focused on whether children use information about other people's competence in their helping. In Study 1 (N = 128 4- to 8-year-old children), children could provide help to both an incompetent target and a competent target by pushing levers. Whereas older children helped incompetent targets more than competent targets, younger children (<5 years) helped both targets equally. Two further experiments (N = 20 and N = 28) revealed that 4-year-olds understood that the incompetent person needed more help and also understood how they could help. Thus, young children do not, like older children, give more help to those who need it the most. We discuss potential developmental changes toward competence-based helping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Four- to 6-year-olds and 7- to 9-year-olds were exposed to high or low inequality. • Those exposed to high inequality gave more resources to the poor. • Older children gave more resources to the poor compared to younger children. • Children who thought the game was unfair were more likely to give to the poor. Research has linked economically unequal environments to lower prosocial behavior in adults. However, we know little about how inequality affects children's prosociality. Here, 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 128) played a series of games with several puppets where points were awarded. The distribution of points was characterized by either high inequality or low inequality. Children's donation behavior (i.e., the number of stickers they donated to a poor child), resource division behavior (i.e., how they divided extra points among poor and rich puppets), and fairness perceptions (i.e., how fair they perceived the game to be) were measured in response. Although the experimental manipulation of inequality did not affect children's donations, exploratory analyses revealed that higher inequality in children's home suburb was linked to lower donation rates. Furthermore, with age, children distributed points with increasing concern for poorer individuals, and negative judgments of the inequality were linked to distributing resources to poorer individuals. Here we present the first comprehensive analysis of children's prosocial reactions to high and low inequality across development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Little is known about how children understand and distinguish different ways of obtaining power. • Children's attitudes toward the two ways of acquiring power change with age. • Six- to 8-, but not 4- to 5-year-olds, were more likely to favor the powerholders in the prestige situation than in the dominance situation. • When the power did not produce unfair results, 7–8-year-olds favored the powerholder in the prestige-based situation. Notwithstanding alternative ways of obtaining power, social power is mostly commonly acquired through either a dominance approach, where power is grabbed by the powerholder, or a prestige approach, where power is granted by group members. Although children's attitude toward power in the dominance situation has been studied, little is known about how children understand and distinguish different ways of obtaining power. We examined the understanding of power in children aged 4–8 years by their resource allocation behavior in two social power acquisition situations. In Study 1, 4- to 8-year-olds (N = 123) gradually shifted from distributing more to the powerholder to showing no preference for either party (in the prestige situation) or to distributing more to the subordinates (in the dominance situation) as they age. Older children (6–8 years), but not 4- and 5-year-olds, were more likely to favor the powerholders in the prestige situation than in the dominance situation. In Study 2, when power did not produce unfair results, 7- and 8-year-olds (N = 48) favored the powerholder in the prestige situation but showed no preference in the dominance situation. The results suggest that children's attitudes toward the two ways of acquiring power are gradually differentiated with age, and children's resource allocation in the power situations is influenced by the way of acquiring power and children's equity concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We explored children's resource allocation in three cultures (N=432). • Friendship had a strong influence on children's distribution in all three cultures. • Merit affected the allocation of Chinese and German, but not of Kikuyu children. • Half of the children in all cultures favored friendship over merit. Recent work has suggested that principles of fairness that seem like natural laws to the Western mind, such as sharing more of the spoils with those who contributed more, can in fact vary significantly across populations. To build a better understanding of the developmental roots of population differences with respect to fairness, we investigated whether 7-year-old children (N = 432) from three cultural backgrounds—Kenya, China, and Germany—consider friendship and merit in their distribution of resources and how they resolve conflicts between the two. We found that friendship had considerable and consistent influence as a cross-culturally recurrent motivation: children in all three cultures preferentially shared with a friend rather than with a neutral familiar peer. On the other hand, the role of merit in distribution seemed to differ cross-culturally: children in China and Germany, but not in Kenya, selectively distributed resources to individuals who worked more. When we pitted friendship against merit, there was an approximately even split in all three cultures between children who favored the undeserving friend and children who shared with the hard-working neutral individual. These results demonstrate commonalities and variability in fairness perceptions across distinct cultures and speak to the importance of cross-cultural research in understanding the development of the human mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 4½ -10-year-olds judged mothers' hypothetical, unfair responses to peer conflicts. • Maternal commands were seen as very unfair and unacceptable for mostly moral reasons. • Children judged that actors should disobey and would feel bad if they complied. • Judgments of unfairness for ambiguous harm increased with age. Retaliation for provoked harm was seen as more fair with age. Research on children's evaluations of parental discipline or parental responses to peer conflicts has focused on parents' responses to hypothetical or actual child behavior. These parent behaviors are typically depicted as fair, reasonable, and appropriate, but what if they are not? In daily life, parents do sometimes act unfairly, or children evaluate parents' responses as such. This study examined 90 4.5- to 10-year-old U.S. middle-class children's (M age = 7.42 years, SD = 1.70) evaluations of four scenarios describing hypothetical mothers' unfair responses to peer conflicts (unjustified stealing; intentional harm; accidental harm; ambiguous harm). Across ages, children overwhelmingly judged mothers' directives, particularly regarding a straightforwardly immoral demand (unjustified stealing), as wrong and very unfair, based primarily on moral justifications or coordinated justifications involving recognition of different competing moral (or moral and nonmoral) concerns. With age, children increasingly viewed directives to retaliate for intended harm as more fair and those regarding ambiguous harm as more unfair; justifications recognizing different concerns also increased with age, although more for retaliation for accidental and intended harm than for other situations. Children largely endorsed disobedience and attributed negative emotions to actors who were described as complying. Thus, children prioritized moral concerns over obedience to authority when mothers asserted authority unfairly, although their responses showed variability with age and the situational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 5- and 7-year-olds punish most when they are the direct victims of unfairness. • 5- to 7-year-olds do not systematically take intent into account when punishing. • 7- but not 5-year-olds engage in reliable 3rd-party punishment of unfair outcomes. Humans punish fairness violations both as victims and as impartial third parties, which can maintain cooperative behavior. However, it is unknown whether similar motivations underlie punishment of unfairness in these two contexts. Here we approached this question by focusing on how both types of punishment develop in children, asking the question: What motivates young children to punish in response to fairness norm violations? We explored two potential factors: the direct experience of unfair outcomes and a partner's fair versus unfair intentions. The participants, 5- and 7-year-olds, were given the chance to engage in both second- and third-party punishment in response to either intended or unintended fairness norm violations in a single paradigm. In both age-groups, children were more likely to punish when they were directly affected by the allocation (second-party punishment) than when they were an uninvolved third party (third-party punishment). Reliable third-party punishment was shown only in the older age-group. Moreover, children's punishment was driven by outcome rather than intent, with equal rates of punishment when unequal outcomes were either the result of chance or the intentional act of another child. These findings suggest that younger children may be mainly motivated to create equal outcomes between themselves and others, whereas older children are motivated to enforce fairness norms as a general principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Collaboration increases a normative concern for equity in young children. • Between 3-5 years of age children intervene against inequitable distributions between collaborators. • Children reference equity as the norm for sharing across resource acquisition contexts. • Equity is normative across contexts, yet collaboration motivates intervention against inequity. Collaboration increases equity in young children, but whether this precocious equity has a normative foundation or is primarily an interpersonal concern between collaborators remains an open question. Participants in this study were 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 104) from a rural community in Canada. In a novel third-party intervention game, children could intervene against inequitable sharing between third parties who earned resources collaboratively or individually. When resources were earned collaboratively, children intervened against inequity more often at an earlier age compared with when resources were earned individually. Children referenced equity or fairness to justify their decisions at a similar rate across the two resource acquisition contexts. These findings contribute to a growing body of evidence supporting the foundational role of collaboration in the development of fairness, providing novel evidence that this concern for fairness is indeed normative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children who were hungrier shared fewer of their own resources with others. • Hungry children expect others to be more generous than they are themselves. • As children grew older, they increasingly endorsed need-based equity. • Hunger did not influence evaluations of equal and equitable resource allocations. How does feeling hungry affect children's sharing and evaluations of others' moral decision making? To examine this question, we gave 4- to 9-year-old children the opportunity to share resources with an anonymous other child and to evaluate third-party resource allocation decisions between hungry and full recipients. We also measured children's subjective reports of their own hunger, predicting that hungry children would be less generous in their own sharing and more likely to prefer distributions that favor the hungry recipient. Children's sharing increased with age, as did positive evaluations of equitable third-party distributions. Hungrier children were less likely to share overall, but particularly when sharing food-relevant resources. Hunger did not influence third-party resource allocation evaluations, and children still expected fairness from others even when behaving differently themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Even the youngest children employed a sophisticated notion of fairness. • Decision making did not differ greatly by age. • Fairness-based decision-making did not vary as a function of temporal location. The notion of what constitutes fairness has been assumed to change during childhood, in line with a marked shift from outcome-based to intention-based moral reasoning. However, the precise developmental profile of such a shift is still subject to debate. This study sought to determine the age at which the perceived intentions of others begin to influence fairness-related decision making in children (aged 6–8 and 9–11 years) and adolescents (aged 14 and 15 years) in the context of the mini-ultimatum game. The mini-ultimatum game has a forced-choice design, whereby a proposer needs to select one of two predetermined offers that a responder can either accept or reject. Due to these constraints, the procedure measures sensitivity to unfair intentions in addition to unfair outcomes. Participants needed to make judgments about how likely they would be to reject various offers, how fair they judged these offers to be, and the emotion they experienced when thinking about the offers. Contrary to previous published reports, we found that even 6- to 8-year-olds employed a sophisticated notion of fairness that took into account the alternatives the proposer had available. Crucially, decision making did not differ as a function of age. A further, and novel, aim was to trace the developmental origins of temporal asymmetries in judgments ab out fairness by testing the implications of adopting a past or future temporal perspective. Across all ages, we found no evidence that fairness-based decision making varies as a function of temporal location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• It has been investigated whether young children consider reciprocity to be a norm. • Evidence for the development of a reciprocity norm during the preschool period has been found. • 5–6-year-olds preschoolers actively enforce a reciprocity norm. Reciprocity has been suggested to represent a crucial normative principle for humans. The current study aimed to investigate the normative foundations of reciprocity and the development of a reciprocity norm in young children. To this end, we presented 3- to 6-year-olds with three conditions. In one condition, a protagonist reciprocated sharing a large proportion of resources. In another condition, a protagonist reciprocated sharing a small proportion of resources. In a third condition, a protagonist did not reciprocate sharing a large proportion by giving rather few resources and, thus, violated a reciprocity norm. Results show that 5- and 6-year-olds endorse compliance with a reciprocity norm, which is reflected in their evaluations of the protagonists and their spontaneous verbal affirmation of reciprocal behavior. In contrast, 3- and 4-year-olds exclusively valued general prosociality, neglecting reciprocity. This indicates that children acquire a norm of reciprocity during the course of the preschool period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Young children upheld ownership rights and supported equality. • Children high in access to resources prioritized ownership over equality. • Children low or middle in access to resources did not. • Perceived access to resources impacts children's reasoning about fair treatment. This study examined how young children's (N = 101, M age = 4.14 years, SD = 0.57) perceptions of their families' access to resources affect their views on others' use and distribution of familiar items. Using a simple measure involving stickers, children identified their families as either lower, higher, or in the middle in access to resources. Then, children evaluated a scenario in which an individual took crayons from one person and gave them to another in order to establish equality. Children who saw themselves as higher in access to resources determined that this was "not okay" (ownership took priority). By contrast, children who saw themselves as lower in access to resources or in the middle did not consistently prioritize equality or ownership. Thus, not only did young children think about how much or how little their families had, but these perceptions also played a role in their reasoning about the fair treatment of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children considered both merit and intergroup relations during resource allocation. • Merit was most frequently the primary concern in children's resource allocation. • Group bias only affected merit-based allocation when they shared intensest conflict. • With age, children were increasingly capable of weighing merit and group bias. From early in life, children show sensitivity to both merit and group membership. However, little research has examined how children react to the conflicting demands of allocating meritoriously and favoring in-groups during resource allocation over the course of their development. We compared how children aged 3–5 years and children aged 6–8 years allocated and reasoned about allocations to in-group and out-group members in a merit-based context. In Study 1, in four distribution tasks, children needed to allocate resources to high- and low-merit persons who were either in-group or out-group members and then indicate the reasons for their decisions. In Study 2, we chose the condition where the conflict between merit and group bias was strongest and further tested the effect of merit and group bias. We found that children prioritized merit across conditions, whereas in a context where the conflict was sufficiently intense they also took group membership into consideration. In addition, with age, children incorporated the conflicting demands of merit and group bias during resource allocation. The findings suggest that, with age, children weighed the moral concerns of merit and the social concerns of group bias when determining the allocation of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]