Abstract
Recent research in moral psychology have suggested that children make judgments about distributive justice early on in development, and in particular they appear to be able to use merit when distributing the benefits of a collective action. This prediction has recently been validated in various western cultures but it is unknown whether it also applies to more collectivistic cultures, in which the group might be favoured over the individual, and need over merit. Here, we investigate merit-based distributions among 81 children belonging to two Asian societies, China and Japan (mean age = 5.0 years). In line with the idea that children’s moral psychology develops early, we found that Chinese and Japanese children are able to use merit to distribute the benefits of a collective action.
Highlights
Over the past few years, developmental studies asking children to distribute resources to third parties have consistently demonstrated that the concern for fairness emerges early in development
In the free distribution phase, Japanese children’s modal response was egalitarian, with 29 out of 39 children distributing one cookie to each character and the second most frequent distribution, chosen by 6 children, was one that favoured the character who had contributed more to the cooking
We divided the sample in two age groups: a younger group (4 year-olds) and an older group (5 year-olds) and found that this difference between Japan and China was stronger in the younger age group with no Japanese vs. half the Chinese Japanese 4-year olds giving two cookies to the big contributor and one to the small contributor
Summary
Over the past few years, developmental studies asking children to distribute resources to third parties have consistently demonstrated that the concern for fairness emerges early in development. Some researchers have argued that Asian societies place more emphasis on collectivism, and emphasize the importance of the group, of attending to others, and of fitting in [9,10,11]. According to this body of research, these specific norms may promote a different development of fairness principles. In this framework, people living in collectivistic societies are claimed to have a different conception of the self and its relation to the group: “In America, ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease.’. School-age children in a range of cultures conceived as collectivistic have been found to value individual rights [16], Wainryb’s work on moral judgments and reasoning with the Druze in Israel [17], Killen and collaborators’s research on fairness judgments in Colombia and Japan [18,19], Turiel’s research on fairness judgments in Turkey [20]
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