Fair or Not Fair: The Developmental Trajectories of Young Children's Fairness Attitudes and Behaviours
Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Fairness considerations affect people's behaviour in a wide range of everyday life situations and are fundamental to humans' ability to maintain cooperative relationships with others (Engelmann & Tomasello, 2019; McAuliffe et al., 2017; Warneken, 2018). Prior studies have demonstrated that young children's fairness judgements focus on equality and shift to merit and others' needs along development under contexts that call for equity-based resource distributions. However, less attention has been paid to the context in which these trends occur. The current study incorporated a resource distribution paradigm in a third-party context to examine when, and under what context, children acquire and apply principles of fairness across early childhood. Specifically, I assessed children's judgements of a third party's resource distribution and resource allocation behaviours via a novel fairness vignette task at two time points – when children were approximately 5 and 7 years old. Analyses revealed that children consistently judged others' resource distribution as more "okay" in fair conditions and more "not okay" in unfair conditions when they were 5 and 7 years of age. Contrary to my hypotheses and existing research, the rewards characters received relative to their effort mattered more than the cooperative context when children judge others' resource distribution strategies. Further, children were no more likely to distribute resources equitably in the joint context than in the individual context. Parallel to my hypothesis, children's resource distribution behaviours shift as they age, adopting principles of equality and equity more and acting less inequitably. Although the effects were similar across the two contexts, it is not to say contexts do not matter over time. Results from the present study add to the growing body of literature designed to understand children's fairness considerations along the developmental path.
Author: Chen, Xueying (Shirley)
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7056497542