The moral, or the story? Changing children's distributive justice preferences through social communication

Abstract

Can social communication alter children's preexisting inclinations toward equality-based or merit-based forms of resource distribution? Six- to eight-year-old children's (N = 248) fairness preferences were evaluated with third-party distribution tasks before and after an intervention. Study 1 indicated that stories about beavers dividing wood had no impact on children's fairness preferences, while Study 2 indicated that brief, direct testimony was highly influential. Study 3 matched storybooks and testimony in content, with each discussing a situation resembling the distribution task, and both formats exerted a significant impact on children's fairness preferences that persisted across several weeks. There were some indications that interventions preaching the superiority of equality-based fairness were particularly effective, but there were no differences between reason-based and emotion-based interventions. Overall, storybooks and testimony can powerfully and enduringly change children's existing distributive justice preferences, as long as the moral lessons that are conveyed are easily transferable to children's real-world contexts.