Not just what you did, but how: Children see distributors that count as more fair than distributors who don't

Abstract

To distribute resources in a fair way, identifying an appropriate outcome is not enough: We must also find a way to produce it. To solve this problem, young children spontaneously use number words and counting in fairness tasks. We hypothesized that children are also sensitive to other people's use of counting, as it reveals that the distributor was motivated to produce the outcome they believed was fair. Across four experiments, we show that U.S. children (N = 184 from the New Haven area; ages four to six; Approximately 58% White, 16% Black, 18% Hispanic, 4% Asian, and 4% other) believe that agents who count when distributing resources are more fair than agents who produce the same outcome without counting, even when both agents invest the same amount of effort. And vice versa, when the same two agents produce an unfair outcome, children now condemn the agent who counted. Our findings suggest that, from childhood, people understand that counting reflects a motivation to be precise and use this to evaluate other people's behavior in fairness contexts.