The Development of Fairness Expectations and Prosocial Behavior in the Second Year of Life

Recent work provides evidence that expectations regarding a fair (i.e., equal) distribution of goods and resources arise sometime in the second year of life. To investigate the developmental trajectory of fairness expectations, and their potential relation to prosocial behavior, infants participated in a violation-of-expectancy (VOE) paradigm designed to assess expectations regarding how resources are typically distributed, and in a sharing task, an informational helping task, and an instrumental helping task. Infants’ expectations regarding resource distribution showed age-related changes between 12 and 15 months, with only 15-month-old infants showing greater attention to unfair (unequal) over fair (equal) outcomes in the VOE. Individual differences in infants’ sensitivity to unfair outcomes were related to infants’ willingness to share a preferred toy. In contrast, helping behavior was unrelated to infants’ sensitivity to unfair outcomes and did

[1]  I. Lane,et al.  Reward allocation in preschool children. , 1972 .

[2]  M. Deutsch.  Equity, Equality, and Need: What Determines Which Value Will Be Used as the Basis of Distributive Justice? , 1975 .

[3]  M. Lewis,et al.  Infants' responses to strangers: midget, adult, and child. , 1976, Child development.

[4]  L. Sroufe.  Wariness of Strangers and the Study of Infant Development. , 1977 .

[5]  Dale F. Hay,et al.  Cooperative interactions and sharing between very young children and their parents. , 1979 .

[6]  S. Feinman.  Infant response to race, size, proximity, and movement of strangers* , 1980 .

[7]  D. Hay,et al.  Giving and requesting: Social facilitation of infants' offers to adults* , 1982 .

[8]  R. Baillargeon.  Object permanence in 3½- and 4½-month-old infants. , 1987 .

[9]  Carol M. Lauer,et al.  Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior , 2001 .

[10]  L. Moses,et al.  Individual differences in inhibitory control and children's theory of mind. , 2001, Child development.

[11]  U. Fischbacher,et al.  The nature of human altruism , 2003, Nature.

[12]  Jessica A. Sommerville,et al.  Pulling out the intentional structure of action: the relation between action processing and action production in infancy , 2005, Cognition.

[13]  Jessica A. Sommerville,et al.  Infants' Sensitivity to the Causal Features of Means‐End Support Sequences in Action and Perception , 2005 .

[14]  Colin Camerer,et al.  “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies , 2005, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[15]  M. Tomasello,et al.  12- and 18-Month-Olds Point to Provide Information for Others , 2006 .

[16]  W. Arsenio,et al.  The effects of social injustice and inequality on children's moral judgments and behavior: Towards a theoretical model , 2006 .

[17]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees , 2006, Science.

[18]  James H. Fowler,et al.  Egalitarian motives in humans , 2007, Nature.

[19]  Amanda L. Woodward,et al.  Infants track action goals within and across agents , 2007, Cognition.

[20]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Helping and Cooperation at 14 Months of Age. , 2007, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[21]  Elizabeth S. Spelke,et al.  Foundations of cooperation in young children , 2008, Cognition.

[22]  B. Rockenbach,et al.  Egalitarianism in young children , 2008, Nature.

[23]  M. Tomasello,et al.  The roots of human altruism. , 2009, British journal of psychology.

[24]  Celia A. Brownell,et al.  To share or not to share: When do toddlers respond to another's needs? , 2009, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[25]  J. Fowler,et al.  The Role of Egalitarian Motives in Altruistic Punishment , 2007 .

[26]  David G. Rand,et al.  Currency value moderates equity preference among young children , 2010 .

[27]  C. Brownell,et al.  Toddlers' prosocial behavior: from instrumental to empathic to altruistic helping. , 2010, Child development.

[28]  L. Surian,et al.  The developmental roots of fairness: infants' reactions to equal and unequal distributions of resources. , 2011, Developmental science.

[29]  V. Kuhlmeier,et al.  Examining the Diversity of Prosocial Behavior: Helping, Sharing, and Comforting in Infancy. , 2011, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[30]  Michael Tomasello,et al.  Young Children Share the Spoils After Collaboration , 2011, Psychological science.

[31]  Jessica A. Sommerville,et al.  Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants , 2011, PloS one.

[32]  Jason P. Mitchell,et al.  Equitable decision making is associated with neural markers of intrinsic value , 2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[33]  J. Deloache,et al.  When Getting Something Good is Bad: Even Three-year-olds React to Inequality , 2011 .

[34]  R. Baillargeon,et al.  Do Infants Have a Sense of Fairness? , 2012, Psychological science.