Equality matching describes a mode in which reciprocal relationships are maintained. While Thomas argues for core representations that can support equality matching, we argue that two forms of reciprocity must be considered and may require distinct representations: positive and negative direct reciprocity. We review both evolutionary and developmental evidence in support of this proposal.

Children consider both procedures and outcomes when evaluating the fairness of inequality. Among adults both factors also contribute to fairness but social comparison of outcomes can override the impact of fair procedures. We tested whether this social comparison effect occurs for children between 4 and 7 years of age (N = 134) when fair procedures are used to create inequality. In addition, we examined the role of emotions is shaping fairness judgments, both when the child was a recipient and when other children were. Children received one of three conditions: Third Party, in which other children received the unequal outcomes; First Person Disadvantaged, in which the child was a recipient and received less than a peer; or First Person Advantaged, in which the child received more. Children rated the fairness of the combined procedure and outcome and evaluated the emotions of the recipients. Results showed that children who were disadvantaged recipients viewed the distribution of inequality as less fair than children who judged a third party situation. Emotions also predicted children's fairness judgments but varied by condition, recipient and age. At all ages, children who felt more sad at receiving less in the first person disadvantaged condition gave lower fairness ratings. Moreover, older children who rated the advantaged recipient as less happy also gave lower fairness ratings but this occurred in all conditions. This study shows that both social comparison and emotions play important roles in children's developing sense of fairness.

Stark intergroup variation in prosocial behavior, as elicited with economic experiments, is evident even though humans are highly mobile. Conformity to local norms has been posited to play an integral role in the maintenance of this variation. Experiments suggest that adults indeed rapidly infer pro- and antisocial norms in a new or changed social environment and adjust their behavior to reflect the inferred norms. Studies of the ontogeny of prosocial behavior show that by middle childhood, children’s prosocial behavior conforms to that of local adults. Furthermore, by this stage, children are susceptible to the manipulation of explicit normative information. However, as yet unknown is whether children concomitantly have the propensity to 1) rapidly infer local cooperative norms in a novel, realistic social environment, 2) extend these inferences to norms for unobserved behaviors, and 3) apply the inferred norms in the same environment. Here, we used a slideshow to introduce children (age nine to eleven) to a novel social environment, Neighborhood X, which differed by condition (Prosocial or Antisocial). We measured perceived cooperative norms in children’s Own Neighborhood and in Neighborhood X via questionnaires; norms for Neighborhood X diverged drastically dependent upon condition, a result robust to the exclusion of questions about norms for unobserved behaviors. Children’s perceived cooperative norms in Own Neighborhood predicted their prosocial behavior (Dictator Game) in Own Neighborhood. Moreover, even though information about giving behavior was not presented in the slideshow, inferred norms for Neighborhood X predicted children’s prosocial behavior in the same milieu. Changes from baseline prosocial behavior, as measured with a separate helping task, did not extend beyond Neighborhood X. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that humans have a propensity to rapidly infer and conform to local cooperative norms, thus maintaining group differences in prosocial behavior, and further indicate that this propensity is in operation by middle childhood.

Science education often focuses on knowledge and skills without allowing space to critically explore how we feel about science. This paper shares findings from a study of six teens' science identities through a social-emotional lens. The project involved a year-long employment and education program led through a museum-university partnership during which teens engaged in authentic science research, communication, and education activities such as collecting and analyzing data for federally-funded research; presenting findings in journals and conferences; and educating museum visitors. Youth were involved in a participatory evaluation and analyzed their own survey and interview data about science identity, including interest, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging. Case study data analysis combined descriptive statistics and qualitative coding. Results show that involving teens in reflecting on their science identities allowed them to articulate mixed emotions, contextualize their fluctuating confidence in science, and integrate themselves into their concept of a science person.

BackgroundSharing and fairness are important prosocial behaviors that help us navigate the social world. However, little is known about how and whether individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) engage in these behaviors. The unique phenotype of individuals with WS, consisting of high social motivation and limited social cognition, can also offer insight into the role of social motivation in sharing and fairness when compared to typically developing (TD) individuals. The current study used established experimental paradigms to examine sharing and fairness in individuals with WS and TD individuals.MethodsWe compared a sample of patients with WS to TD children (6-year-olds) matched by mental age (MA) on two experimental tasks: the Dictator Game (DG, Experiment 1, N = 17 WS, 20 TD) with adults modeling giving behaviors used to test sharing and the Inequity Game (IG, Experiment 2, N = 14 WS, 17 TD) used to test fairness.ResultsResults showed that the WS group behaved similarly to the TD group for baseline giving in the DG and in the IG, rejecting disadvantageous offers but accepting advantageous ones. However, after viewing an adult model giving behavior, the WS group gave more than their baseline, with many individuals giving more than half, while the TD group gave less. Combined these results suggest that social motivation is sufficient for sharing and, in particular, generous sharing, as well as the self-focused form of fairness. Further, individuals with WS appear capable of both learning to be more generous and preventing disadvantageous outcomes, a more complex profile than previously known.ConclusionsIn conclusion, the present study provides a snapshot into sharing and fairness-related behaviors in WS, contributing to our understanding of the intriguing social-behavioral phenotype associated with this developmental disorder.

[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).

Friendship is an important aspect of children's social lives. However, little is known about how it influences children's fairness behavior towards their peers. We tested (N = 183) pairs of children between 7 and 9 years of age from rural communities in India, Peru and Canada that are known to have divergent norms of fairness. Participants were paired with either a close friend or an acquaintance and could accept or reject different allocations of valuable resources. We experimentally compared children's responses to disadvantageous allocations (less for self) and advantageous allocations (more for self). Results showed that across the three societies children were more likely to reject disadvantageous allocations when they were paired with a friend relative to an acquaintance. When they stood to gain a relative advantage, children in Canada and to some extent Peru were more likely to reject advantageous allocations with friends, yet children in India rejected these offers rarely regardless of who they were paired with. These findings suggest that friendship may shape the expression of fairness concerns in young children, though its influence varies across societies.

This study investigated the effect of prosocial video game exposure on sharing behavior in Chinese preschoolers and tested the mediating role of empathy as well as the moderating roles of age and gender. A total of N = 120 children aged 4–6 years (50% girls, 50% boys; Mage = 5.0, SD = 0.82) from two Chinese kindergartens participated in this between-subjects design experiment. The results showed that the preschoolers who played prosocial video games exhibited more sharing behavior than those who played neutral video games. Empathy, especially affective empathy, was found to mediate the association between playing prosocial video games and sharing behavior. This suggests that empathy training programs, especially those that promote affective empathy, may be an effective means of promoting sharing behavior in children. The mediating effect was mainly observed for girls and older children. Girls and older children may therefore be the target group for sharing behavior education programs that aim to increase empathy in playing prosocial video games. Nevertheless, promoting sharing behavior in younger children and boys is equally important and deserves attention in future research.

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.

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 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.

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 objective and subjective socioeconomic status 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.

Research has shown that children’s inequity aversion to disadvantage (DI) emerges in preschool years, whereas their inequity aversion to advantage (AI) does not always emerge during childhood across societies. Here we tested children in China, where children are exposed to Confucian values such as “suffering a disadvantage is a blessing”, suggesting that Chinese children might show a different developmental pattern of stronger emphasis of AI as compared to DI. Four- to twelve-year-old Chinese children (N = 178 pairs, 90 girls) participated in the Inequity Game to explore when DI and AI emerges. Two experiments demonstrated that DI emerged around the age of five and AI emerged around the age of seven, a pattern similar to findings from studies with Western children. By including Chinese sample, the present work extends previous insight that DI emerges earlier than AI. Chinese unique cultural background emphasizing self-discipline and reputation are discussed to interpret the early and pronounced aversion to advantageous inequity in a non-WEIRD society.

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.

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.

Adults with anxiety have demonstrated elevated risk perception, but the relation between risk perception and anxiety in youth is unclear. The lack of developmentally tailored risk perception measures may be hindering the accurate detection of the relation between these constructs in youth. We sought to better characterize the relation between two components of risk perception - probability and cost estimates - to anxiety in youth, using a novel measure of youth risk perception (P-RISK; Perception of Risk Interactive Scale for Kids). In a community sample of 60 youth (ages 6 to12), the P-RISK, as a measure of risk perception, was feasible, easy to administer, and able to convey concepts of probability to youth. Anxiety symptomatology in youth was uniquely related to their perception of the likelihood of anxiety-provoking events. There is preliminary, though mixed, evidence of correlations between youth anxiety level and their cost estimates of anxiety-provoking events. There was also preliminary evidence that the relations between anxiety and youth estimates of probability and cost varied by developmental level. These findings highlight the potential clinical utility of using a developmentally tailored risk perception measure to enhance the assessment and treatment of youth anxiety.

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.

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.