"But the poor needed it more": Children's judgments on procedural justice to allocate resources between two candidates equal in merit, different in need.

The current study investigated children's judgments on procedural justice and its outcomes when the candidates were equal in merit but different in need. A total of 88 children (41 girls and 47 boys) aged 7 to 11 years were individually interviewed (Mage = 8 years 9 months, SD = 14.065 months). Results showed that, regardless of age, children tended to give educational resources to the resource-poor candidates. However, children's welfare consideration of the resource-poor candidates increased with age. Children also made differentiated judgments based on the resource type and treated educational materials as more necessary than educational experiences. Children's age and socioeconomic status (SES) were associated with this differentiation. Younger and high-SES children were more likely to view the outcome of procedural justice (i.e., drawing a stick) for allocating an educational experience (i.e., summer camp) as fair when the result favored the resource-rich candidate. Overall, findings revealed that children do not use a unitary form of fairness in the procedural justice context. The shift from strict equality to welfare concerns continues to develop over middle childhood.

When Fairness Clashes with Personal Autonomy and Parental Authority: A Comparison of Daughters' and Mothers' Reasoning in Two Cultural Contexts in Turkey.

The author examined religious and secular daughters' and mothers' reasoning about personal autonomy, maternal authority, and moral concepts in family decision-making situations in urban Turkey. Sixty-eight daughters and 34 mothers were individually interviewed about decision-making autonomy in general issues and hypothetical daughter-mother conflicts. Results indicated participants regardless of their family status and religious background assigned more decision-making autonomy to mothers when evaluating general issues. Analysis of controversial issues as hypothetical conflicts indicated that daughters and mothers do not hold unitary social judgments about the social world that were always consistent with the norms of their community and family status. There were some religious background differences in evaluations of some conflict stories as a function of whether they evaluated the choices as moral, conventional, personal, and prudential matters. Although secular and religious participants conceptualized daughters and mothers in relational terms rather than characterizing the relations and social issues by harmony, obedience to authority, and acceptance of norms findings suggested that secular women evaluated the hypothetical adolescent-mother conflicts more consistently when the issue entails violation of a moral principle such as justice, fairness, and well-being of the other.