Development Of Children's Fair Cognition And Fair Behavior In Group Distribution Situation

Fair cognition and fair behavior are important contents of children's social development.Fairness problems encountered by children in life mainly come from resource allocation.The principle of fair distribution can be mainly divided into three types:'equality','equity' and 'need'.The fair distribution in this study means 'equality'.Most of the existing studies have explored children's fair cognition and fair behavior in the personal field,and found that 8 years old is a turning point in the development of children's fair behavior.As members of a group,do children think that resources should also be distributed equally among groups?Or do children of different ages have different perceptions?Studies have shown that people often have in-group preferences and may allocate more resources to internal group members when allocating resources.Resources are not always allocated equally among groups.This inequality may be beneficial to internal groups and may also be disadvantageous to internal groups.So how do children evaluate such inequalities of resources among groups?If there are opportunities to restore equality when allocating new resources,will children implement it?If children have in-group preferences,they will give more resources to the inner groups,regardless of the number of in-group resources.If they are driven by fairness,they will give more resources to disadvantaged groups to regain equality.Children of different ages may have different performances.Previous studies have shown that under the "self-interested" group norms,children positively evaluate the member's fair distribution on the basis of fairness,even if the behavior violates group norms.But when can children distinguish group's view from their own?This study answers these questions through three experiments and explores the developmental characteristics of 4-11 children's fairness in the group environment.Experiment 1 examined whether children's evaluation of inequality and new distribution behavior will be effected by in-group preferences.First,children evaluated the inequality that is disadvantaged to their in-group and out-group.Second,they allocated new resources to the two groups.Third they evaluated other people's strategies for restoring equality and expanding inequality.The results showed that:(1)all children(4-11 year-olds)who witnessed their in-group receiving fewer school supplies evaluated the inequality negatively,however,only 9-11 year-old children judged the inequality negatively when they witnessed out-group receiving few school supplies.(2)The majority of younger children(4-5 year-old)who witnessed their in-group at a disadvantage rectified the inequality,versus a minority of younger children who witnessed the out-group at a disadvantage,and the proportion of younger children(31%,36%)who rectified the inequality differed significantly from the proportion of older children(77.2%,55.6%).The proportion of older children rectifying the inequality did not differ significantly by which group had received fewer supplies.(3)Children at all ages evaluated the Rectify strategy more positively than the Perpetuate strategy when witnessed the in-group receiving fewer school supplies.There is no significant difference between evaluation of the Perpetuate and Rectify allocation strategies when 4-year-old child witnessed the out-group receiving fewer school supplies.Experiment 2 investigated children's expectations for others' evaluation and resource allocation decisions,whether the in-group preferences were also taken into account for others.The experimental procedure was the same as the first two steps of the experiment.Results show that:the 4-year-olds expected individuals who were in disadvantaged group and advantaged group all to rectify the inequality.They gave more resources to disadvantaged group when their in-group receiving fewer school supplies than their expectation of others' allocation.Older children expect others' behavior to be consistent with themselves.Experiment 3 combined the research paradigms of group dynamics and investigated whether children's evaluation of egoism and equal distribution behavior is based on the principle of fairness,and when children are able to distinguish their own views from group 's view.The results showed that:(1)Children at all age evaluate fair distribution positively.Through the analysis of the reasons,it was found that children generally adopted the principle of fairness as their evaluation criteria;(2)The 4-9-year-old children's evaluation of self-interest behavior was at a random level.The 11-year-old children evaluate the self-interest distribution significantly negative.Children of different ages had different reasons.The 4-year-old and 5-year-old children used the principle of group interests and fairness.The 5-year-old children used more fairness principle.The 9-year-old children used the principles of group norms and fairness.The most of 11-year-old children used the principle of fairness.(3)The 9-year-old and 11-year-old children's evaluation of equal distribution was significantly positive than the expected group's evaluation and the evaluation of self-interested distribution was significantly negative than the expected group evaluation.Indicating that older children began to pay attention to the role of group norms,they can distinguish their own views from group's view.Thus draw the following conclusions that:(1)With age,children increasingly recognized the importance of equal access to school supplies,judged the resource inequality more negatively and corrected past disparities.(2)Young children showed in-group bias by allocating more resources to members of their own school,they like fair allocation as well as advantaged allocation.Older children not only positively evaluate others' fair allocation but also do it by themselves.