The Effect Of Interest Involvement And Affective Perspective Taking On Children’s Inequity Aversion

Inequity aversion refers to the individual’s resistance to unfair distributive outcomes and unfair procedures,and it is an expression of prosocial behavior.The research on children’s inequity aversion can be divided into two domains: distributive justice and procedural justice.The dual-processing theory claimed that children’s inequity aversion is influenced by both cognitive process and emotional process.This study combines the two domains of distributive justice and procedural justice,and refers to the influence of interest involvement and affective perspective taking on children’s inequity aversion.In the first study,95 children aged 6,8 and 10 were selected to participate in the resource allocation task by using the traditional forced choice paradigm in the domain of distributive justice,and the influence of interest involvement and affective perspective taking on inequity aversion was explored.The results show that in the domain of distributive justice,(1)interest involvement has a significant impact on children’s inequity aversion,and children show more inequity aversion under the condition of non-involvement than under the condition of involvement;(2)The affective perspective taking has a significant impact on children’s inequity aversion,and children with higher ability to affective perspective taking show more inequity aversion than children with lower ability;(3)The interaction between interest involvement and affective perspective taking is significant.Under the condition of involvement,affective perspective taking has a significant effect on inequity aversion,and children with higher affective perspective taking ability show more inequity aversion.Under the condition of non-involvement,three groups of children with different affective perspective taking levels generally show strong inequity aversion,with no significant difference.In the second study,we used a procedural choice paradigm in the domain of procedural justice.111 children aged 6,8 and 10 were selected to participate in the resource allocation task,and the influence of interest involvement and affective perspective taking on inequity aversion in the domain of procedural justice was explored when the distributive justice could not be realized.The results show that in the domain of procedural justice,(1)interest involvement has a significant impact on children’s inequity aversion,and children show more inequity aversion under the condition of non-involvement than under the condition of involvement;(2)The affective perspective taking has a significant impact on children’s inequity aversion,and children with higher ability to affective perspective taking show more inequity aversion than children with lower ability;(3)The interaction between interest involvement and affective perspective taking is significant.Under the condition of involvement,affective perspective taking has a significant effect on inequity aversion,and children with higher affective perspective taking ability show more inequity aversion.Under the condition of non-involvement,three groups of children with different affective perspective taking levels generally show strong inequity aversion,with no significant difference.The research results show that in the two domains of distributive justice and procedural justice,inequity aversion is influenced by both cognitive and emotional processes,which supports the dual-process theory,and suggests that the development of children’s inequity aversion can be promoted by intervening and training the ability of affective perspective taking.