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Can children exploit knowledge asymmetries to get away with selfishness? This question was addressed by testing 6‐ to 9‐year‐old children (N = 164; 81 girls) from the Northeastern United States in a modified Ultimatum Game. Children were assigned to the roles of proposers (who offered some proportion of an endowment) and responders (who could accept or reject offers). Both players in the Informed condition knew the endowment quantity in each trial. However, in the Uninformed condition, only proposers knew this information. In this condition, many proposers made "strategically selfish" offers that seemed fair based on the responders' incomplete knowledge but were actually highly selfish. These results indicate that even young children possess the ability to deceive others about their selfishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children show social preferences for resource-rich individuals, although few studies have explored the causes underlying such preferences. We evaluate the viability of one candidate cause: Children believe that resource wealth relates to behavior, such that they expect the resource rich to be more likely to materially benefit others (including themselves) than the resource poor. In Studies 1 and 2 (ages 4-10), American children from predominantly middle-income families (n = 94) and Indian children from lower income families (n = 30) predicted that the resource rich would be likelier to share with others than the resource poor. In Study 3, American children (n = 66) made similar predictions in an incentivized decision-making task. The possibility that children's expectations regarding giving contribute to prowealth preferences is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four studies explored the abilities of 80 adults and 180 children (4-9 years), from predominantly middle-class families in the Northeastern United States, to use information about machines' observable functional capacities to infer their internal, "hidden" mechanistic complexity. Children as young as 4 and 5 years old used machines' numbers of functions as indications of complexity and matched machines performing more functions with more complex "insides" (Study 1). However, only older children (6 and older) and adults used machines' functional diversity alone as an indication of complexity (Studies 2-4). The ability to use functional diversity as a complexity cue therefore emerges during the early school years, well before the use of diversity in most categorical induction tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]