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The development of distributive justice: The roles of children's understanding of the mind, parents, and temperament
Abstract
To study the basis for children's concern for distributive justice, the investigator examined whether children's understanding of the mind, parents' beliefs about fairness, and children's temperament influence preschoolers' distributive justice behavior. One hundred 3- to 5-year-olds participated in the study. Four reward-for-work allocation tasks were presented randomly to the children and they were instructed to distribute stickers between themselves and a fictitious character. In every task, an equality option was pitted against one of two types of unequal self-interest allocations. The study demonstrated that preschoolers did not always choose an outcome that maximized their gains when they were instructed to distribute resources in a reward-for-work allocation task. Instead of their acquisition of a representational theory of the mind, children's expectation of affective consequences of their allocation behavior was the significant predictor of their selection of equal outcome choice. Furthermore, individual differences were found in children's preferences of distributive justice rules. Children's temperament influenced their allocation behavior only when their mothers had low egalitarian value orientation. The findings revealed that preschool children differ in their degree of concern for distributive justice.
Subject Area
Developmental psychology|Social psychology
Recommended Citation
Hashima, Patricia Y, "The development of distributive justice: The roles of children's understanding of the mind, parents, and temperament" (1996). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9700087.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9700087