Developing an Early Awareness of Fairness

Abstract

Concerns about fairness permeate adult and children’s thinking and judgments. Here, I argue that precursors to mature fairness concerns emerge in the first year of life, in the form of infants’ expectations regarding resource distributions, and evaluations of others, based on the principle of equality. These early expectations and evaluations are tightly connected with infants’ own everyday experiences as actors and observers in their social world, suggesting that infants’ social interactions likely play a role in the acquisition of these moral precursors. While these early precursors provide infants with an entry point into moral judgments concerning fairness, outstanding critical questions remain, including whether infants’ early fairness awareness and evaluations extend beyond the notion of equality to encompass other fairness principles, whether these early precursors incorporate notions of agent intentionality, whether infants can distinguish fairness norm violations (and other moral violations) from social conventions, and whether infants can appreciate and enact punishment in response to unfair behavior. Future research will benefit from a continued investigation of the experiential and cultural factors that shape these early moral precursors, providing scholars with the means to flesh out the developmental emergence of moral concerns from infancy through early childhood.