How do children behave when they distribute rewards from task participation?

Abstract

Children's distributional justice was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, pairs of children played a game in which they guessed which card the experimenter would turn up next. We investigated the effect of age (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds), gender, country (Indonesia or New Zealand), and instructional set on how the children distributed the sweets at the conclusion of the game. Children usually distributed equally, but five-year-olds often distributed according to neither equity nor equality. All the 7- and 9-year-olds applied the same distribution principle over two rounds of the game. In Experiment 2, many of the same children made an allocation preference in response to a hypothetical scenario. Older children, in particular, often showed differences between their allocation in this experiment and their behaviour in Experiment 1. Overall, Damon's (1975) account of children's ideas of distributional justice held up well as a description of the children's actual behaviour in our experiments.

Acknowledgments

This research was completed as part of the requirements for an MSc. in Psychology for Putri Fraser. The research was supported by a grant from the Psychology Department, University of Canterbury.