Counting promotes proportional moral evaluation in preschool-aged children

Preschool-aged children show remarkable sophistication in their social evaluation of others, yet struggle struggle with proportional social evaluation (evaluating others not only with respect to how much they give, but what proportion they give). Here, we explored whether prompting children to count would enhance using proportion during social social evaluation. Following prior work (McCrink et al., 2010), preschoolers (N = 130) completed 4 trials in which they made social evaluations of 2 puppets. The trials pitted puppets whose giving behavior was (1) absolutely (i.e., numerically) equal but proportionally different (one puppet gave 2/8 and another gave 2/4), (2) absolutely different but proportionally equal (2/4 vs. 1/2), (3) in conflict (one puppet gave proportionally more, but the other gave absolutely more; 1/2 vs. 2/8), and (4) whose proportional and absolute giving showed no conflict (3/4 vs. 1/12). Our critical question was whether children would select the poorer puppet (puppet with smaller endowment). Children were assigned to one of four conditions: a Full Counting condition in which they were prompted to count both the puppet's initial endowment as well as the stickers the puppet shared, a Partial Counting condition in which they counted only the initial endowment, a No Counting Condition, and a Continuous Condition in which a puppet gave 3/8 of a piece of playdough, rather than 3 of 8 stickers). These results show that encouraging children to count when evaluating sharing decisions promotes proportional reasoning in social evaluations. Additionally, across all conditions, our reaction time measures showed that selecting the poorer puppet was associated with slower reaction times (less automatic) than selecting the richer puppet during the conflict trial. The results are discussed in terms of implications for how cognitive limitations influence children's social reasoning in the context of equity.