Fairness and Children Article Summary
Jeremy McKenzie
Liberty University, PSYC210
Professor June Vess
November 20, 2022
Summary
The human concept of fairness corresponds with development of morality. It has been of interest
to researchers to find out how children develop concepts related to fairness, when these concepts
take hold, and what causes this to happen. In this article, the writer details a new experimentation
technique that would lead to researchers discovering that children begin to develop a thought
structure surrounding fairness at a very young age. It was found that very young children, as
young as thirteen months exhibited the ability to reason about the fair distribution of resources
and preferred to socialize with those that exhibited similar conceptual principles regarding
fairness (Lucca K, Pospisil J, Sommerville JA 2018).
Description of Process
The authors argue that the ability to reason about fairness plays a defining role in the
development of morality. Thus, researchers have long been interested in understanding when and
how a sensitivity to fairness first develops. Here, we examined infants’ ability to use fairness
information in selecting social partners. Using a novel experimental paradigm that combined pre-
recorded stimuli with an active behavioral measure, we tested whether infants preferred to
socially engage with an individual they had previously seen behave fairly or unfairly.
After viewing an individual distribute goods to third parties either equally (i.e., 3:3 distribution)
or unequally (i.e., 5:1 distribution), both 13- and 17-month-old infants selectively chose to
engage in a social interaction with (i.e., take a toy from) an individual who distributed resources
equally. The use of a novel paradigm to assess infants’ fairness preferences demonstrates that
infants’ previously established fairness preferences extend across different, more demanding
paradigms, and may therefore be more enduring in nature.
Together, these findings provide new insights into the nature of infants’ fairness representations,
and fill in key gaps in the developmental timeline of infants’ ability to use fairness information in
their consideration of potential social partners. In sum, these findings build on previous research
by demonstrating that infants not only hold an expectation that resources should be distributed
fairly, they also preferentially interact with those who have previously done so. The early-
emerging ability to both reason about and use fairness information may play an influential role in
the development of complex prosocial behaviors related to morality more broadly.
Fairness expectations
The article highlights early fairness expectations of toddlers. To investigate infants’ early
fairness expectations, researchers have utilized violation-ofexpectancy (VOE) paradigms which
test whether fairness transgressions draw enhanced visual attention from infants. For example,
upon viewing individuals distribute resources fairly (2:2 distribution of resources) and unfairly
(3:1 distribution of resources) to third party recipients, infants between 12 and 15 months of age
look longer at unfair distributions. Infants’ increased looking towards unequal distributions
suggests that it violates their expectations about how third-party fairness interactions typically
play out. In a series of follow-up studies, researchers have investigated the developmental origins
of infants’ fairness expectations. Findings from Ziv and Sommerville (2016) revealed that at 6-
and 9-month-olds do not hold fairness expectations. A study by Meristo and colleagues (2016)
found that just one month later, at 10 months of age, infants hold fairness expectations—
suggesting that infants’ fairness expectations first begin to emerge around 10-months of age.
The authors argue that, At 10 months of age, as infant’s fairness expectations are first emerging,
there is evidence to suggest that these expectations are already quite sophisticated: infants hold
an affiliative expectation that unfair individuals should not, or typically are not, approached by
third parties. As infants enter their second year of life, their fairness expectations become even
more complex. Infants expect resource distributions to align with social dominance structures
and only expect resources to be distributed equally when both receiving parties have equally
earned those resources. Infants also hold expectations about how fair and unfair individuals
should be treated: fair individuals should be praised, whereas unfair individuals should be
admonished.
Social selections on the basis of fairness
The article argued that while tests of infants’ fairness expectations require minimal effort from
infants (i.e., they must either look or not look at different stimuli), tests of infants’ preference for
fair individuals are much more demanding. In social preference tasks, infants must first rank
their relative evaluations of two or more individuals, which requires them to keep track of which
individuals exhibited fair or unfair behaviors. Then, infants must integrate their decision with a
motor behavior, in most cases reaching, in order to establish their preference.
Despite the complexity of this type of task, a recent study by Burns and Sommerville (2014)
found that infants as young as 15 months are capable of using an individual’s prior history of
acting fairly to guide their selection of social partners. In this study, infants preferred to engage
in a social interaction with (i.e., take toys from) an individual who previously distributed
resources fairly, as opposed to unfairly. Importantly, this does not appear to be true of younger
infants: 10-month-olds do not demonstrate a preference for fair over unfair individuals.
Assessing infants’ fairness preferences across paradigms In addition to assessing infants’ fairness
preferences across development, it is important to assess fairness preferences across paradigms.
Assessing infants’ fairness preferences across different paradigms has the potential to provide
important insights into the nature of these preferences. Traditionally, research on infants’ fairness
preferences has used manual choice measures, in which infants indicate their preference through
reaching.
This type of assessment makes the act of selection easy for infants, as infants begin reaching as
early as 3 months. In the current study, we made the act of establishing a social preference more
difficult for infants. Specifically, we had infants select a social partner using a more recently
developed and difficult to produce behavior: crawling or walking combined with reaching.
Rather than placing two toys directly in front of the infant, as in prior work, we positioned them
in out-of-reach boxes such that infants had to first leave the comfort of their caregivers’ lap, then
crawl or walk towards the boxes, and finally combine these behaviors with reaching into a box to
search for a toy.
By requiring infants to establish their social preference using more effortful and complex
behaviors than previously used measures, the current study makes several, inter-related
contributions to the literature on infants’ fairness preferences. Most broadly, by testing whether
infants’ fairness preferences replicate across different measurements we aimed to provide new
insights into the nature of infants’ underlying fairness representations. Indeed, different
behavioral measures that attempt to assess the same underlying construct often produce different
results.
These dissociations provide important information about the nature of the underlying
representation that is being assessed. For instance, studies using looking-time paradigms to
assess infants’ object permanence find evidence that infants can mentally represent hidden
objects, whereas studies on older children using reaching paradigms fail to replicate this finding.
Rather than interpreting these discrepancies as evidence that object permanence is discontinuous
across development, researchers have argued that infants have a weak representation of object
permanence, meaning, their object permanence is graded, or only partially-developed, when
measured early in life.
If infants’ fairness preferences are also graded, and not fully adult-like in nature, we would
predict that paradigms with fewer task demands (e.g., reaching measures) would find evidence
that infants prefer fair individuals, whereas paradigms that place additional demands on infants,
such as the one used in the current study, would find no evidence for fairness preferences.
Alternatively, if fairness preferences (based on the principle or norm of equality) are already
robust and quite sophisticated during infancy, we would expect to find evidence of fairness
preferences, regardless of how they are measured.
The paradigm used in the current study places three additional physical and cognitive demands
on infants, compared to previously used reaching paradigms. First, it requires that infants
integrate multiple different behaviors together. For infants to be successful in our task, they had
walk or crawl and combine that behavior with reaching and search behaviors. Second, it calls for
infants to produce a behavior that is less well-rehearsed than simply reaching: infants begin
reaching as early as 3 months, whereas they only begin walking at around 12 months of age.
Finally, the behaviors infants needed to produce in the current paradigm take more time to
produce than reaching alone. Thus, any preferences that emerge in the current study is likely
indicative of a more deliberate choice and enduring representation than those assessed in
previously used reaching paradigms. Reaching paradigms that require infants to make a quick
and easy-to-produce selection may only be tapping into a momentary and fleeting preference. In
using a novel paradigm to assess infants’ fairness preferences, we also aimed to provide
important pragmatic insights into infants’ early social preferences.
Testing infants’ preferences across paradigms allows us to understand the conditions under
which infants’ fairness preferences can be replicated, a question that is particularly important in
the current climate of concerns about both direct and conceptual replications. Unlike previous
studies that have examined infants’ fairness preferences either by using pre-recorded stimuli or
live actors, the current design exposed infants to fairness information using pre-recorded visual
stimuli, but assessed infants’ social preferences with an active behavioral measure (adapted from.
Specifically, we simultaneously combined pre-recorded stimuli with a forced choice task to
create the illusion that infants had the choice to socially interact with a fair or unfair individual
who appeared on a projector screen. This novel method allowed us to capture infants’ naturalistic
social behavior while maintaining the experimental control that is afforded by using pre-recorded
stimuli (e.g., the presentation of stimuli was held constant, we could confirm that infants were
attentive to the display).
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