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Third-party punishment has been regarded as an important mechanism to promote fairness. Although previous research has shown that children aged 6 and older punish unfair behaviors at a personal cost, it is unknown whether they actually intend to establish equality or whether equality is a mere byproduct of punishment. In this preregistered study, N = 60 five- to 9-year-olds witnessed that an agent made unfair resource allocations to a peer. Children could then decide not only whether to punish but also how much to punish. We found that with age, children's intervention is more likely to equalize outcomes between third parties (e.g., turning 3:1 into 1:1). In conclusion, the egalitarian motive to reduce differences in payoffs could underlie children's punishment over development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Third-party punishment of selfish individuals is an important mechanism to intervene against unfairness. However, there is another way in which third parties can intervene. Rather than focusing on the unfair individual, third parties can choose to help those who were treated unfairly by reducing inequality. Such third-party helping as an alternative to third-party punishment has received little attention in studies with children. Across four studies, we examined the evaluations of third-party punishment versus third-party helping in N = 322 5- to 9-year-old children. Study 1, 3 and 4 showed that when asked about the agents directly, children evaluated both helpers and punishers positively, but they preferred helpers over punishers overall. When asked about the type of intervention itself, children preferred helping over punishment, suggesting that their preference for the type of intervention corresponds to how children think about the agents performing these interventions. Study 2 showed that children's preference for third-party helping is driven by distributive justice concerns and not a mere preference for giving or resource maximization as children consider which type of third-party intervention decreases inequality. Together, these studies demonstrate that children between 5 and 9 years of age develop a sophisticated understanding of punishment and helping as two adequate forms of intervention, but also display a preference for third-party helping. We discuss how these findings and prior work with adults support the hypothesis of developmental continuity, showing that a preference for helping over punishment is deeply rooted in ontogeny., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Advantageous inequity aversion emerges relatively late in child development, yet the mechanisms explaining its late emergence are poorly understood. Here, we ask whether children begin to reject advantageous inequity, a costly form of fairness, once reputational concerns are in place. Specifically, we examine the role of peer monitoring in promoting fair behavior. In Study 1 ( N = 212 pairs; Ages 6 to 9), we test whether children are less likely to reject advantageous allocations depending on who is aware of their behavior. Results show that children are more likely to accept advantageous allocations when their peer partner is unaware of their advantage. In Study 2 ( N = 134 pairs; Ages 8 and 9), we show that this effect is driven specifically by whether the affected peer partners can see the allocation and not by whether third-party peer observers witness the decision. Together, these results shed light on the factors influencing fairness development in childhood and, more specifically, suggest that advantageous inequity aversion is influenced by a desire to appear fair to those getting the short end of the stick. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Across all cultures, humans engage in cooperative activities that can be as simple as preparing a meal or sharing food with others and as complex as playing in an orchestra or donating to charity. Although intraspecific cooperation exists among many other animal species, only humans engage in such a wide array of cooperative interaction and participate in large-scale cooperation that extends beyond kin and even includes strangers., (© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

In this reply to Ceci, Burd, and Helm, we discuss future directions for developmental research to (1) study the motivations underlying white lies and (2) how to classify lies that reflect other-regard and self-interest simultaneously., (© 2015 The British Psychological Society.)

We investigated whether children tell white lies simply out of politeness or as a means to improve another person's mood. A first experimental phase probed children's individual insight to use white lies when prosocial behaviour was called for. We compared a situation in which a person had expressed sadness about her artwork and the goal was to make her feel better (Sad condition) with a situation in which a person was indifferent about her work (Neutral condition). Children at 7 years and older were more likely to tell a white lie than the blunt truth in the Sad over the Neutral condition. Five-year-olds showed only a trend. A second phase tested whether children selectively use white lie telling after it was modelled by an adult. Results showed that after modelling, children from all age groups were significantly more likely to use white lies in the Sad condition than in the Neutral condition. Taken together, these results show that children are attentive to another person's affective states when choosing whether to tell a white lie or tell the truth. We discuss the emergence of this behaviour in relation to children's developing social cognition and the increasing sophistication of children's prosocial behaviour., (© 2015 The British Psychological Society.)

Human adults engage in costly third-party punishment of unfair behavior, but the developmental origins of this behavior are unknown. Here we investigate costly third-party punishment in 5- and 6-year-old children. Participants were asked to accept (enact) or reject (punish) proposed allocations of resources between a pair of absent, anonymous children. In addition, we manipulated whether subjects had to pay a cost to punish proposed allocations. Experiment 1 showed that 6-year-olds (but not 5-year-olds) punished unfair proposals more than fair proposals. However, children punished less when doing so was personally costly. Thus, while sensitive to cost, they were willing to sacrifice resources to intervene against unfairness. Experiment 2 showed that 6-year-olds were less sensitive to unequal allocations when they resulted from selfishness than generosity. These findings show that costly third-party punishment of unfair behavior is present in young children, suggesting that from early in development children show a sophisticated capacity to promote fair behavior., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Recent research in developmental psychology shows that children understand several principles of fairness by 3 years of age, much earlier than previously believed. However, children's knowledge of fairness does not always align with their behavior, and immediate self-interest alone cannot explain this gap. In this forum paper, we consider two factors that influence the relation between fairness knowledge and behavior: relative advantage and how rewards are acquired., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

When enforcing norms for cooperative behavior, human adults sometimes exhibit in-group bias. For example, third-party observers punish selfish behaviors committed by out-group members more harshly than similar behaviors committed by in-group members. Although evidence suggests that children begin to systematically punish selfish behavior around the age of 6 y, the development of in-group bias in their punishment remains unknown. Do children start off enforcing fairness norms impartially, or is norm enforcement biased from its emergence? How does bias change over development? Here, we created novel social groups in the laboratory and gave 6- and 8-year-olds the opportunity to engage in costly third-party punishment of selfish sharing behavior. We found that by age 6, punishment was already biased: Selfish resource allocations received more punishment when they were proposed by out-group members and when they disadvantaged in-group members. We also found that although costly punishment increased between ages 6 and 8, bias in punishment partially decreased. Although 8-y-olds also punished selfish out-group members more harshly, they were equally likely to punish on behalf of disadvantaged in-group and out-group members, perhaps reflecting efforts to enforce norms impartially. Taken together, our results suggest that norm enforcement is biased from its emergence, but that this bias can be partially overcome through developmental change.

This study investigates how children negotiate social norms with peers. In Study 1, 48 pairs of 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 96) and in Study 2, 48 pairs of 5- and 7-year-olds (N = 96) were presented with sorting tasks with conflicting instructions (one child by color, the other by shape) or identical instructions. Three-year-olds differed from older children: They were less selective for the contexts in which they enforced norms, and they (as well as the older children to a lesser extent) used grammatical constructions objectifying the norms ("It works like this" rather than "You must do it like this"). These results suggested that children's understanding of social norms becomes more flexible during the preschool years., (© 2013 The Authors. Child Development © 2013 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

Egalitarian behavior is considered to be a species-typical component of human cooperation. Human adults tend to share resources equally, even if they have the opportunity to keep a larger portion for themselves. Recent experiments have suggested that this tendency emerges fairly late in human ontogeny, not before 6 or 7 years of age. Here we show that 3-year-old children share mostly equally with a peer after they have worked together actively to obtain rewards in a collaboration task, even when those rewards could easily be monopolized. These findings contrast with previous findings from a similar experiment with chimpanzees, who tended to monopolize resources whenever they could. The potentially species-unique tendency of humans to share equally emerges early in ontogeny, perhaps originating in collaborative interactions among peers.

Human children 18-24 months of age and 3 young chimpanzees interacted in 4 cooperative activities with a human adult partner. The human children successfully participated in cooperative problem-solving activities and social games, whereas the chimpanzees were uninterested in the social games. As an experimental manipulation, in each task the adult partner stopped participating at a specific point during the activity. All children produced at least one communicative attempt to reengage him, perhaps suggesting that they were trying to reinstate a shared goal. No chimpanzee ever made any communicative attempt to reengage the partner. These results are interpreted as evidence for a uniquely human form of cooperative activity involving shared intentionality that emerges in the second year of life.

Third-party punishment has been regarded as an important mechanism to promote fairness. Although previous research has shown that children aged 6 and older punish unfair behaviors at a personal cost, it is unknown whether they actually intend to establish equality or whether equality is a mere byproduct of punishment. In this preregistered study, N = 60 five- to 9-year-olds witnessed that an agent made unfair resource allocations to a peer. Children could then decide not only whether to punish but also how much to punish. We found that with age, children's intervention is more likely to equalize outcomes between third parties (e.g., turning 3:1 into 1:1). In conclusion, the egalitarian motive to reduce differences in payoffs could underlie children's punishment over development.

Advantageous inequity aversion emerges relatively late in child development, yet the mechanisms explaining its late emergence are poorly understood. Here, we ask whether children begin to reject advantageous inequity, a costly form of fairness, once reputational concerns are in place. Specifically, we examine the role of peer monitoring in promoting fair behavior. In Study 1 (N = 212 pairs; Ages 6 to 9), we test whether children are less likely to reject advantageous allocations depending on who is aware of their behavior. Results show that children are more likely to accept advantageous allocations when their peer partner is unaware of their advantage. In Study 2 (N = 134 pairs; Ages 8 and 9), we show that this effect is driven specifically by whether the affected peer partners can see the allocation and not by whether third-party peer observers witness the decision. Together, these results shed light on the factors influencing fairness development in childhood and, more specifically, suggest that advantageous inequity aversion is influenced by a desire to appear fair to those getting the short end of the stick.

Young children begin helping others with simple instrumental problems from soon after their first birthdays. In previous observations of this phenomenon, both naturalistic and experimental, children's parents were in the room and could potentially have influenced their behavior. In the two current studies, we gave 24-month-old children the opportunity to help an unfamiliar adult obtain an out-of-reach object when the parent (or a friendly female adult) (i) was present but passive, (ii) was present and highlighted the problem for the child, (iii) was present and actively encouraged the child to help, (iv) was present and ordered the child to help, or (v) was absent from the room. The children helped at relatively high levels and equally under all these treatment conditions. There was also no differential effect of treatment condition on children's helping in a subsequent test phase in which no parent was present, and children had to disengage from a fun activity to help. Young children's helping behavior is not potentiated or facilitated by parental behavior in the immediate situation, suggesting that it is spontaneous and intrinsically motivated. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Two experiments investigated the proclivity of 14-month-old infants (a) to altruistically help others toward individual goals, and (b) to cooperate toward a shared goal. The infants helped another person by handing over objects the other person was unsuccessfully reaching for, but did not help reliably in situations involving more complex goals. When a programmed adult partner interrupted a joint cooperative activity at specific moments, infants sometimes tried to reengage the adult, perhaps indicating that they understood the interdependency of actions toward a shared goal. However, as compared to 18- and 24-month-olds, their skills in behaviorally coordinating their actions with a social partner remained rudimentary. Results are integrated into a model of cooperative activities as they develop over the 2nd year of life. (Contains 4 tables and 5 figures.)

In theory of mind research, there is a long standing dispute about whether children come to understand the subjectivity of both desires and beliefs at the same time (around age 4), or whether there is an asymmetry such that desires are understood earlier. To address this issue, 3-year olds' understanding of situations in which two persons have mutually incompatible desires was tested in two studies. Results revealed that (i) children were quite proficient at ascribing incompatible desires to two persons, and in simpler scenarios even incompatible desire-dependent emotions; (ii) children showed this proficiency even though they mostly failed the false belief task. Overall, these results suggest that there is an asymmetry such that young children come to understand the subjective nature of desires before they understand the corresponding subjectivity of beliefs. Possible explanations for this asymmetry are discussed in light of conceptual change and information-processing accounts of theory of mind development.

Does political partisanship extend to childhood? To what degree are children, a largely non‐political population, impacted by parents' and communities' political orientations? We examined children's behaviours and attitudes during a politically divisive event – the COVID‐19 pandemic. Children (4‐ to 12‐year‐olds; N = 313) of liberal (vs. conservative) parents reported greater preventive COVID‐19 behaviours, such as mask wearing and physical distancing, and responded more positively to these health behaviours. At the community level, children living in Democratic‐voting (vs. Republican‐voting) U.S. counties more strongly endorsed preventive COVID‐19 behaviours. Political orientation was a better predictor than education, income, religiosity, population‐density, and infection rates. Mediation and moderation analyses revealed that the parent–child political link was driven by children's perceptions of their parents' guidance, behaviours, and concern about COVID‐19, and that this link was attenuated in Democratic‐ versus Republican‐voting counties. Political orientation appears to play an unexpectedly prominent role, both at the intimate family and broader community level, in determining children's behaviours and attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Third-party punishment has been regarded as an important mechanism to promote fairness. Although previous research has shown that children aged 6 and older punish unfair behaviors at a personal cost, it is unknown whether they actually intend to establish equality or whether equality is a mere byproduct of punishment. In this preregistered study, N = 60 five- to 9-year-olds witnessed that an agent made unfair resource allocations to a peer. Children could then decide not only whether to punish but also how much to punish. We found that with age, children's intervention is more likely to equalize outcomes between third parties (e.g., turning 3:1 into 1:1). In conclusion, the egalitarian motive to reduce differences in payoffs could underlie children's punishment over development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children begin helping others with simple instrumental problems from soon after their first birthdays. In previous observations of this phenomenon, both naturalistic and experimental, children's parents were in the room and could potentially have influenced their behavior. In the two current studies, we gave 24-month-old children the opportunity to help an unfamiliar adult obtain an out-of-reach object when the parent (or a friendly female adult) (i) was present but passive, (ii) was present and highlighted the problem for the child, (iii) was present and actively encouraged the child to help, (iv) was present and ordered the child to help, or (v) was absent from the room. The children helped at relatively high levels and equally under all these treatment conditions. There was also no differential effect of treatment condition on children's helping in a subsequent test phase in which no parent was present, and children had to disengage from a fun activity to help. Young children's helping behavior is not potentiated or facilitated by parental behavior in the immediate situation, suggesting that it is spontaneous and intrinsically motivated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We investigated preschoolers’ selective learning from models that had previously appeared to be reliable or unreliable. Replicating previous research, children from 4 years selectively learned novel words from reliable over unreliable speakers. Extending previous research, children also selectively learned other kinds of acts – novel games – from reliable actors. More important, – and novel to this study, this selective learning was not just based on a preference for one model or one kind of act, but had a normative dimension to it. Children understood the way a reliable actor demonstrated an act not only as the better one, but as the normatively appropriate or correct one, as indicated in both their explicit verbal comments and their spontaneous normative interventions (e.g., protest, critique) in response to third-party acts deviating from the one demonstrated. These findings are discussed in the broader context of the development of children''s social cognition and cultural learning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]