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Highlights: [•] We investigated children's understanding of ownership rights for new objects. [•] Children protested when their own objects were taken away and referred to ownership. [•] 3-year-olds attributed ownership to a third party, but failed to intervene on her behalf. [•] Ownership claims were due to effort invested as little ownership protest occurred for raw materials. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Merit is a key principle of fairness: rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task. Previous research suggests that children have an early ability to take merit into account in third-party situations but that merit-based sharing in first-party contexts does not emerge until school-age. Here we provide evidence that three- and five-year-old children already use merit to share resources with others, even when sharing is costly for the child. In Study 1, a child and a puppet-partner collected coins that were later exchanged for rewards. We varied the work-contribution of both partners by manipulating how many coins each partner collected. Children kept fewer stickers in trials in which they had contributed less than in trials in which they had contributed more than the partner, showing that they took merit into account. Few children, however, gave away more than half of the stickers when the partner had worked more. Study 2 confirmed that children related their own work-contribution to their partner’s, rather than simply focusing on their own contribution. Taken together, these studies show that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children; however it remains constrained by a self-serving bias., Psychology

When an object comes into possession, the owner will typically think that it is worth more than it did before they owned the item in a bias known as the endowment effect. This bias is particularly robust in Western societies with independent self-construals, but has not been observed in children below 5-6years of age. In three studies, we investigated whether endowment effect can be induced in younger children by focusing their attention on themselves. 120 children aged 3-4years evaluated toys before and after a task where they made pictures of themselves, a friend or a neutral farm scene. Over the three studies, children consistently evaluated their own possessions, relative to other identical toys, more positively following the self-priming manipulation. Together these studies support the notion that possessions can form part of an "extended self" from early on in development and that the endowment effect may be due to an attentional self-bias framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]