Distributive Justice Of Young Children And The Relationship Between It And Theory Of Mind

Distributive justice concerns how individuals distribute resources in a fair manner,including three main principles: equity,equality and need.Equity is a key principle of fairness: rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task.Previous researches suggest that children's equity-based distributive justice don't emerge until school-age,recent studies indicate that young children could perform distributive justice judgment and behavior based on the principle of equity.The dual-process theory think that there are two different underlying processes of children's distributive justice: the automatic emotional process and the controlled cognitive process,so the factor influencing the development of children's distributive justice included theory of mind and situational involvement level from two key aspects of cognitive and emotional processing.For the developmental characteristics,influencing factors and internal mechanism of young children's distributive justice based on the principle of equity,The current domestic scholars has not explored in depth.On the reference the paradigms of experimental tasks of Kanngiesser P,Warneken F(2012),The study is divided into two parts,we use reward resource allocation paradigm in Experiment1,taking contribution principle that is one of the principles of equitable distribution as the breakthrough point to investigated the development characteristics of 186 participants aged from3 to 5 years old young children's distributive justice behavior and the impact of situational involvement level on distributive justice behavior of young children in the involved and uninvolved contexts.Experiment 2 focus on the relationship between Theory of Mind and young children's distributive justice behavior in two different contexts(involved and uninvolved).125 participants aged from 4 to 5 participated in the giving Game.We explore the question of how Theory of Mind affect children's resource distributing behavior using distributive justice principles.The results show:(1)The children of 3~5 years old can take into account the different contribution in the rewards distribution,they show the fair distribution of behavior based on principle of contribution and the fair distribution of behavior has the significant age characteristics.(2)The involvement of distribution context has an effect on children's distributive justice behavior,in uninvolved context,the member of reward that each age group allocation more than that is in the involved context.The amount of reward that is allocationed by young children has a significant age difference in the involved context.(3)Theory of Mind promote children's distributive justice behavior,but there is not an interaction between Theory of Mind and the involvement of under involved context,children who pass Theory of Mind tasks perform much more fairly than the children who don't pass in two context,Together,these two experiments associate a link of how children would understand distributive justice principle,and how they could use it in allocating resources.Theory of Mind may have stable and impact on children's distributive justice.