About this session

Saturday, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The foundations of fairness in childhood: Cognitive biases, procedural choices and social roles

Research over the past dozen years has demonstrated that children have a robust and complex sense of fairness. However, much remains unknown about the cognitive and social mechanisms that shape fairness across development. In this symposium, we bring together four papers that highlight understudied aspects of fairness: cognitive biases, procedural choices and social roles. The first presentation investigates 5- to 8-year-olds’ preferences for selective over egalitarian procedures used to allocate scarce resources. Findings reveal that with age, children increasingly differentiate between selective (need-based, order of arrival, maximizing length of benefit) and egalitarian procedures. The second presentation examines 5- to 13-year-old children and adults’ implicit preferences for fairness in context of disadvantageous and advantageous inequity. Results show that children and adults have strong implicit preferences for equality when they are disadvantaged but not when advantaged. The third presentation investigates how 6- to 11-year-olds in China perceive fairness for leaders and non-leaders. The researchers found that younger children expected leaders to contribute more and take fewer rewards, demonstrating a ‘self-sacrifice’ effect, while older children showed more balanced expectations of leaders and non-leaders. The final presentation examines whether 3.5- to 6-year-old children’s reward allocations after a collaborative task are driven by a self-serving bias or an overestimation of their own contributions. The findings reveal that children tend to overestimate their own contributions which results in a self-bias in collaborative contexts. Combined, this symposium introduces new methods and topics and adds sample diversity to the study of fairness in childhood.

Paper #1
Title	Egalitarian procedures are not always fair: The development of preferences for selective procedures
Presenting author	Montana Shore, Boston University, United States

Paper #2
Title	Implicit Fairness Biases in Children and Adults
Presenting author	Dr. Felix Warneken, Ph.D., University of Michigan, United States

Paper #3
Title	From ‘Self-sacrifice’ to ‘Fair Leadership’: Children’s Expectations for Leaders in Group Contributions and Reward Allocations
Presenting author	Siyu Ma, Tsinghua University, China

Paper #4
Title	Investigating children’s reward allocations within the context of collaboration
Presenting author	Selina J. Fu, University of Toronto, Canada

View all paper details

Session chair
Peter R. Blake, Ed.D., Boston University, United States

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