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ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5903-5932
Access Type
Open Access Thesis
Document Type
thesis
Degree Program
Psychology
Degree Type
Master of Science (M.S.)
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Month Degree Awarded
May
Abstract
Children have an early-emerging expectation that resources should be divided fairly amongst agents, yet their behavior does not begin to align with these expectations until later in development. This dissociation between knowledge and behavior raises important questions about the mechanisms that encourage children to behave how they know they should behave. Here I tested whether explicitly invoking fairness norms encourages costly fair decisions in 4- to 9-year-old-children. I examine children’s responses to unequal resource allocations in the Inequity Game by varying the direction of inequity (advantageous versus disadvantageous inequity) and normative information (to be fair or to act autonomously). The results show children are more likely to reject advantageous allocation in the Fairness norm condition than in the Autonomous norm condition, but I did not see this difference when children are presented with disadvantageous allocations. This study showcases children’s costly fairness norm enforcement as a flexible process, one that can be brought in and out of alignment with their knowledge of fairness by shining a spotlight on how one ought to behave.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/28419951
First Advisor
Tara Mandalaywala
Second Advisor
Katherine McAuliffe
Third Advisor
Allecia Reid
Fourth Advisor
. Evelyn Mercado
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Gonzalez, Gorana, "Explicit Norms Promotes Costly Fairness in Children" (2022). Masters Theses. 1187.
https://doi.org/10.7275/28419951
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/1187