Children's Distributive Justice Reasoning:The Impact of Developmental and Contextual Factors

사회적 관계에 따른 아동의 분배정의 추론의 발달

The present study was designed to assess the effect of relationship on children's distributive justice reasoning. 259 kindergarten, second-grade, and fifth-grade children were asked to allocate 9,000 Won to 3 characters under three different relationship conditions (strangers, peers, and siblings), provide rationales for those allocations, and rate the fairness of 4 different patterns of allocation. Older children were sensitive to relationship information such as allocation of more money to productive rather than to needy or older strangers, more to needy friends than to productive or older friends, and more to older than to a productive sibling. However, young children relied on only one principle, equality, across the relationship conditions. Kindergartners viewed allocations based on age entitlement as fairer than older children did, whereas both groups of older children rewarded individuals based on equality in stranger, equality and need in peer, and equality and equity in sibling relationships.