Children Consider Procedures, Outcomes, and Emotions when Judging the Fairness of Inequality

One of the most common catchphrases we hear young children use is “That’s not fair!”. This raises the question: what do children think is fair? In a new study by the Social Development and Learning Lab (SDLL), participants watched a researcher flip a fair or an unfair coin to decide which of two children would get more stickers. We found that children were okay with one child getting more stickers when the experimenter used the fair coin as opposed to the unfair coin. But, surprisingly, as children got older, they were more likely to rate both situations as unfair. By 7-8 years of age, 50% of the children tested said that inequality was bad even when a fair coin was used to create it.

These findings are timely because during the height of the pandemic, doctors had to decide who would get scarce medical resources like ventilators. Other research has found that most adults believe it is wrong to use coin-flip-like procedures in these cases (Biddison et al., 2018; Schoch-Spana et al., 2020). This is similar to the findings of our research – the older children in our study called the outcome unfair even though the coin used was fair! In future studies, we hope to study what other kinds of procedures are considered fair by both children and adults when the stakes are high!

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Thanks to our RAs Sanjana, Katie A and Elma for their help with this post!