A developmental perspective on the minimalist model: The case of respect for ownership.

The developmental evidence for children's respect for ownership reveals that children will enforce the property rights of third parties before they themselves respect other's property. This pattern of development suggests the need for clarification or modification of the minimalist model. Here, I consider three explanations for the gap between knowledge and behavior for respect of ownership.

Computational signatures of inequity aversion in children across seven societies.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General on Aug 10 2023 (see record 2023-96713-001). In the original article, there were affiliation errors for the first and 14th authors. The affiliations for Dorsa Amir are Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley; and Department of Psychology, Boston College. The affiliation for Katherine McAuliffe is Department of Psychology, Boston College. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Inequity aversion is an important factor in fairness behavior. Previous work suggests that children show more cross-cultural variation in their willingness to reject allocations that would give them more rewards than their partner-advantageous inequity-as opposed to allocations that would give them less than their partner-disadvantageous inequity. However, as past work has relied solely on children's decisions to accept or reject these offers, the algorithms underlying this pattern of variation remain unclear. Here, we explore the computational signatures of inequity aversion by applying a computational model of decision-making to data from children (N = 807) who played the Inequity Game across seven societies. Specifically, we used drift-diffusion models to formally distinguish evaluative processing (i.e., the computation of the subjective value of accepting or rejecting inequity) from alternative factors such as decision speed and response strategies. Our results suggest that variation in the development of inequity aversion across societies is best accounted for by variation in the drift rate-the direction and strength of the evaluative preference. Our findings underscore the utility of looking beyond decision data to better understand behavioral diversity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Developmental risk sensitivity theory: the effects of socio-economic status on children's risky gain and loss decisions.

Evolutionary developmental theories propose that early environments shape human risk preferences. Developmental risk sensitivity theory (D-RST) focuses on the plasticity of risk preferences during childhood and makes predictions about the effect of reward size based on a child's social environment. By contrast, prospect theory predicts risk aversion for gains and risk seeking for losses regardless of environment or status. We presented 4 to 10-year-olds (n = 194) with a set of trials in which they chose between a certain amount and a chance to receive more or nothing. Two trials were equal expected value choices that differed by stake size and two were unequal expected value choices. Children either received gain trials or loss trials. Social environment was assessed using socio-economic status (SES) and subjective social status. Results confirmed the predictions of D-RST for gains based on SES. Children from lower-SES families differentiated between the high- and low-value trials and made more risky decisions for the high-value reward compared with higher-SES children. Children from higher-SES families were more risk averse for both trial types. Decisions for loss trials did not conform completely to either theory. We discuss the results in relation to evolutionary developmental theories.

The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness.

Humans have a deeply rooted sense of fairness, but its emotional foundation in early ontogeny remains poorly understood. Here, we asked if and when 4- to 10-year-old children show negative social emotions, such as shame or guilt, in response to advantageous unfairness expressed through a lowered body posture (measured using a Kinect depth sensor imaging camera). We found that older, but not younger children, showed more negative emotions, i.e. a reduced upper body posture, after unintentionally disadvantaging a peer on (4,1) trials than in response to fair (1,1) outcomes between themselves and others. Younger children, in contrast, expressed more negative emotions in response to the fair (1,1) split than in response to advantageous inequity. No systematic pattern of children's emotional responses was found in a non-social context, in which children divided resources between themselves and a non-social container. Supporting individual difference analyses showed that older children in the social context expressed negative emotions in response to advantageous inequity without directly acting on this negative emotional response by rejecting an advantageously unfair offer proposed by an experimenter at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional foundation of the human sense of fairness and suggest that children's negative emotional response to advantageous unfairness developmentally precedes their rejection of advantageously unfair resource distributions.

Children Consider Procedures, Outcomes, and Emotions When Judging the Fairness of Inequality.

Children tend to view equal resource distributions as more fair than unequal ones, but will sometimes view even unequal distributions as fair. However, less is known about how children form judgments about inequality when different procedures are used. In the present study, we investigated children's consideration of procedures (i.e., resource-distributing processes), outcomes (i.e., the distributions themselves), and emotions (i.e., the emotional reactions of those receiving the resources) when judging the fairness of unequal resource distributions. Participants (N = 130, 3- to 8-year-olds) were introduced to a Fair Coin (different color on each side) and an Unfair Coin (same color on both sides). In two between-subjects conditions, they watched a researcher flip either the Fair or Unfair Coin in order to distribute resources unequally between two child recipients. Participants then rated the fairness of this event, provided verbal justifications for their ratings (coded for references to procedures and/or outcomes), and rated the emotional state of each recipient (from which an Emotion Difference Score was computed). Results revealed that participants rated the event as more fair in the Fair Coin than the Unfair Coin condition. References to the outcome in children's justifications predicted lower fairness ratings, while references to the procedure only predicted lower ratings in the Unfair Coin condition. Greater Emotion Difference Scores predicted lower fairness ratings, and this effect increased with age. Together, these results show that children consider procedures, outcomes, and emotions when judging the fairness of inequality. Moreover, results suggest age-related increases in consideration of recipients' emotions makes inequality seem less fair, even when fair procedures are used. Implications for the development of fairness are discussed.

From "haves" to "have nots": Developmental declines in subjective social status reflect children's growing consideration of what they do not have.

Subjective social status (SSS), or a person's view of their own socioeconomic status, has important consequences for social cognition and wellbeing, yet little is known about its development before adolescence. Previous research finds that SSS declines during childhood. We sought to replicate this finding, and also to extend it by investigating what aspects of children's reasoning drive this developmental decline. To do so, we assessed four- to ten-year-old children's SSS using a MacArthur Ladder Task (n = 377), which has been validated for use with children in this age range. We then assessed children's open-ended rationales for their SSS judgments. Results indicated that SSS declined over child development, replicating previous work. We also confirmed that this decline corresponded with improvements in SSS accuracy; young children overestimated their SSS relative to their objective SES, but were relatively accurate by age ten. Moreover, trends in children's rationales revealed that developmental shifts in both SSS and SSS accuracy corresponded with children's references to what they do not have, but not with references to what they do have, nor with references to any particular status cues (e.g., houses, lifestyle). Thus, children may increasingly consider what they lack to determine their status. Implications for self-evaluation and social cognition are discussed.

Socioeconomic status predicts children's moral judgments of novel resource distributions.

Children's moral judgments of resource distributions as having "fair" or "unfair" origins play an important role in early social cognition. What factors shape these judgments? The present study advances research on this question in two primary ways: First, while prior work has typically assigned children to an advantaged or disadvantaged position in an experimental setting, here we also investigated how relative objective and Subjective Socioeconomic Status (OSS and SSS) predicted children's judgments. Second, while prior work has asked children to judge distributions with known origins, here we presented children with novel and causally ambiguous distributions, thereby simulating children's initial encounter of resource distributions in the social world. We assessed participants' (n = 113, 6- to 9-year-olds) OSS and SSS and then introduced them to a machine that distributed Skittles on an unknown basis. Participants received half as many, twice as many, or the same number of Skittles as a peer in three between-subjects conditions, and then rated the machine's fairness. Results revealed that children who rated their families as wealthier relative to their neighborhoods (higher SSS) rated the machine as more fair. However, children from families that were actually wealthier relative to their neighborhoods (higher OSS) were more likely to rate the disadvantage-giving machine as unfair. Together, results represent the first evidence that OSS and SSS shape children's moral judgments of resource distributions, consistent with evidence that these two forms of socioeconomic status have unique impacts on adults' judgments of inequality. Implications for moral and social development are discussed.

Children's understanding of economic demand: A dissociation between inference and choice.

Adults infer that resources that become scarce over time are in higher demand, and use this "demand inference" to guide their own economic decisions. However, it is unclear when children begin to understand and use economic demand. In six experiments, we investigated the development of demand inference and demand-based economic decisions in 4- to 10-year-old children and adults in the United States. In Experiments 1-5, we showed children two boxes with the same number of compartments but containing different numbers of face-down stickers and varied the information provided about how those differences arose (e.g. that other children had taken the stickers). In separate experiments, we asked children to buy or trade to get a sticker for themselves or to predict what other children would do. We also asked them which set of stickers they thought the other children had preferred to assess their ability to make a demand inference separately from their own choice. Across experiments, children were able to make a demand inference about children's past preferences by 6 years of age. However, children did not use this demand information when making choices for themselves or when predicting what another child would select in the future. In Experiment 6, we adapted the task for adults and found that adult participants inferred that the set containing fewer resources was in higher demand, and selected the higher demand resource for themselves at rates significantly above chance. The overall pattern of results suggests a dissociation between economic inference and economic decisions during early-to-middle childhood. We discuss implications for our understanding of the development of economic reasoning.

The moral, or the story? Changing children's distributive justice preferences through social communication.

Can social communication alter children's preexisting inclinations toward equality-based or merit-based forms of resource distribution? Six- to eight-year-old children's (N = 248) fairness preferences were evaluated with third-party distribution tasks before and after an intervention. Study 1 indicated that stories about beavers dividing wood had no impact on children's fairness preferences, while Study 2 indicated that brief, direct testimony was highly influential. Study 3 matched storybooks and testimony in content, with each discussing a situation resembling the distribution task, and both formats exerted a significant impact on children's fairness preferences that persisted across several weeks. There were some indications that interventions preaching the superiority of equality-based fairness were particularly effective, but there were no differences between reason-based and emotion-based interventions. Overall, storybooks and testimony can powerfully and enduringly change children's existing distributive justice preferences, as long as the moral lessons that are conveyed are easily transferable to children's real-world contexts.

Ingroup bias does not influence inequity aversion in children.

Ingroup favoritism influences third-party norm enforcement: Third-party punishers are more lenient when an ingroup member has been unfair. By contrast, in 2-party contexts, where punishers are the victims of unfairness, group bias effects are absent or inconsistent. Thus, group bias appears to be particularly influential when enforcing fairness among others, but less so when protecting oneself from unfairness. This would have implications for theories of how cooperation and intergroup cognition interact, but a more direct empirical test is lacking. To this end, developmental data are particularly useful as they can tell us whether and if so how group bias and fairness norm enforcement are related from their first emergence. Using a minimal groups manipulation, we induced ingroup bias in 6- to 9-year-olds and tested their willingness to reject disadvantageous (more for you) and advantageous (more for me) resource allocations when paired with in- and outgroup members. Group bias did not affect children's rejections of unfair allocations, although they reported that it was worse when an outgroup member had more. Our findings suggest that ingroup bias does not influence children's costly endorsement of equality, indicating that children perceive the equality norm to be indiscriminate and enforceable across group boundaries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Costly fairness in children is influenced by who is watching.

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).

Essentialization of Social Categories Across Development in Two Cultures.

Children display an "essentialist" bias in their everyday thinking about social categories. However, the degree and form of this bias varies with age and with the nature of the categories, as well as across cultures. This project investigated the development of the essentialist bias across five social categories (i.e., gender, nationality, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status (rich/poor), and sports-team supporter) in two countries. Children between 5 and 10 years of age in Turkey (Study 1, N = 74) and the United States (Study 2, N = 73), as well as adults in both countries (Study 3, N = 223), participated. Results indicate surprising cross-cultural parallels with respect to both the rank ordering of essentialist thinking across these five categories and increasing differentiation among them over development.

Children's Conceptions of Ownership for Self and Other: Categorical Ownership Versus Strength of Claim.

Children are capable of viewing object ownership as categorical and exclusive, but ownership claims can also vary by degree. This study investigated how children use these different conceptions of ownership in a giving and a taking task. In two studies, 4- to 7-year olds (N = 105) could give and take craft objects that they or another child had found (weaker claim) and made (stronger claim). In Study 1, no additional ownership information was given, and in Study 2 categorical ownership was stated ("these belong to you"). The results showed that children used categorical ownership for their own objects but used ownership strength for the other child's objects, taking more of the found items.

Conflicting perspectives mediate the relation between parents' and preschoolers' self-referent mental state talk during collaboration.

We examined the relations between the referent of parents and preschoolers' mental state talk during a collaborative puzzle-solving task (N = 146 dyads; n = 81 3-year-olds, n = 65 4-year-olds). The results showed that parents' references to their own knowledge and beliefs (self-referent cognitive talk), and references to their child's knowledge and beliefs (child-referent cognitive talk) were both related to children's (primarily self-referent) cognitive talk. We then tested whether any of the observed relations could be explained by the presence of conflicting perspectives within the collaborative interaction. Mediational analyses revealed that conflicting perspectives mediated the positive relation between parents' production of self-referent cognitive talk and child cognitive talk. By contrast, the positive relation between parents' production of child-referent cognitive talk and child cognitive talk did not depend on the presence of this type of conflict. These findings highlight an important mechanism through which parents' references to their own mind might promote children's developing mental state talk in collaborative contexts.

Paying Back People Who Harmed Us but Not People Who Helped Us: Direct Negative Reciprocity Precedes Direct Positive Reciprocity in Early Development.

The principle of direct reciprocity, or paying back specific individuals, is assumed to be a critical component of everyday social exchange and a key mechanism for the evolution of cooperation. Young children know the norm of reciprocity, but it is unclear whether they follow the norm for both positive and negative direct reciprocity or whether reciprocity is initially generalized. Across five experiments (N = 330), we showed that children between 4 and 8 years of age engaged in negative direct reciprocity but generalized positive reciprocity, despite recalling benefactors. Children did not endorse the norm of positive direct reciprocity as applying to them until about 7 years of age (Study 4), but a short social-norm training enhanced this behavior in younger children (Study 5). Results suggest that negative direct reciprocity develops early, whereas positive reciprocity becomes targeted to other specific individuals only as children learn and adopt social norms.

Children's fairness in two Chinese schools: A combined ethnographic and experimental study.

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.

How children use accuracy information to infer informant intentions and to make reward decisions.

The ability to assess the value of the information one receives and the intentions of the source of that information can be used to establish cooperative relationships and to identify cooperative partners. Across two experiments, 4- to 8-year-old children (N = 204) received a note with correct, incorrect, or no information that affected their efforts on a search task. Children were told that all informants had played the game before and knew the location of the hidden reward. In the no information condition, children were told that the informant needed to leave before finishing the note and, thus, was not intentionally uninformative. Children rated the note with correct information as more helpful than the note with no information; incorrect information was rated least helpful. When asked about the informant's intentions, children attributed positive intentions when the information was correct and when they received unhelpful information but knew the informant was not intentionally uninformative. Children attributed less positive intentions to the informant when they received incorrect information. When given the chance to reward the informant, children rewarded the informant who provided correct information and no information equally; the informant who provided incorrect information received fewer rewards. Combined, these results suggest that young children assume that informants have positive intentions even when they provide no useful information. However, when the information provided is clearly inaccurate, children infer more negative intentions and reward those informants at lower rates. These results suggest that children tend to reward informants more based on their presumed intentions, placing less weight on the value of the information they provide.

Varieties of Young Children's Prosocial Behavior in Zambia: The Role of Cognitive Ability, Wealth, and Inequality Beliefs.

By the 3rd year of life, young children engage in a variety of prosocial behaviors, including helping others attain their goals (instrumental helping), responding to others' emotional needs (comforting), and sharing resources (costly giving). Recent work suggests that these behaviors emerge early, during the first 2 years of life (Svetlova et al., 2010; Thompson and Newton, 2012; Dunfield and Kuhlmeier, 2013). To date, however, work investigating early varieties of prosocial behavior has largely focused on Western samples and has not assessed the impact of poverty and inequality. In this work, we investigate prosocial behavior in 3-year-olds in Zambia, a lower-middle income country with high wealth inequality. Experiments were integrated into a larger public health study along with both objective and subjective (parent) measures of wealth and inequality. Three-hundred-seventy-seven children (Mean age = 36.77 months; SD = 2.26 months) were presented with an instrumental helping task, comforting task, and two steps of a giving task - one with higher cost (children could give away their only resource) and one with lower cost (children had three resources to give). As predicted, rates of prosociality varied hierarchically by the cost of the action: instrumental helping was the most common followed by comforting, lower cost giving, and higher cost giving. All prosocial behaviors were significantly correlated with one another (with the exception of high cost giving), and with general cognitive ability. Objective family wealth did not predict any of the child's prosocial behaviors. However, subjective beliefs showed that mothers who believed that they had more than others in their village had children who were more likely to engage in instrumental helping, and mothers who believed that village inequality was a problem had children who were more likely to engage in low cost giving. Low cost giving was also more likely for children whose parents reported reading storybooks to them. This suggests that costly giving in the context of pretend play may relate to children's experience with using stories as representations of real life events. The results suggest both cultural differences and universalities in the development of prosociality and point to environmental factors that influence prosociality.

Giving what one should: explanations for the knowledge-behavior gap for altruistic giving.

Several studies have shown that children struggle to give what they believe that they should: the so-called knowledge-behavior gap. Over a dozen recent Dictator Game studies find that, although young children believe that they should give half of a set of resources to a peer, they typically give less and often keep all of the resources for themselves. This article reviews recent evidence for five potential explanations for the gap and how children close it with age: self-regulation, social distance, theory of mind, moral knowledge and social learning. I conclude that self-regulation, social distance, and social learning show the most promising evidence for understanding the mechanisms that can close the gap.

Young children will lie to prevent a moral transgression.

Children believe that it is wrong to tell lies, yet they are willing to lie prosocially to adhere to social norms and to protect a listener's feelings. However, it is not clear whether children will lie instrumentally to intervene on behalf of a third party when a moral transgression is likely to occur. In three studies (N=270), we investigated the conditions under which 5- to 8-year-olds would tell an "interventional lie" in order to misdirect one child who was seeking another child in a park. In Study 1, older children lied more when the seeker intended to steal a toy from another child than when the seeker intended to give cookies to the child. In Study 2, the transgression (stealing) was held constant, but harm to the victim was either emphasized or deemphasized. Children at all ages were more likely to lie to prevent the theft when harm was emphasized. In Study 3, harm to the victim was held constant and the act of taking was described as either theft or a positive action. Children at all ages were more likely to lie when the transgression was emphasized. We conclude that by 5years of age, children are capable of lying to prevent a moral transgression but that this is most likely to occur when both the transgression and the harm to the victim are salient.