Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2014 Mar;119:40-53. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2013.10.007. Epub 2013 Nov 28.
Adults and children dislike inequity-people being paid unequally for equal work. However, adults will allow inequity if the inequity is determined using an impartial procedure, indicating that they value procedural justice. It is unknown whether children value procedural justice when distributing resources. We investigated whether 5- to 8-year-old children would willingly create inequity between two recipients if they could do so using an impartial procedure. In Experiment 1, children preferred to use an impartial procedure (spinning a wheel that gave both recipients an equal chance to get a resource) over a partial procedure (spinning a wheel that gave one recipient a much better chance to get the resource). In Experiments 2 and 3, children preferred to use the same impartial procedure to assign a resource to one of two recipients, even over an option of keeping things equal by throwing the resource in the trash. Importantly, children preferred to throw the resource in the trash to uphold equality when the only other option was a partial procedure. Older children showed a stronger aversion to using partial procedures than younger children. These results suggest that children value procedural justice increasingly during middle childhood and that their fairness concerns may be more about avoiding partiality than inequity per se.
成年人和儿童都不喜欢不公平——人们为同等的工作获得不同的报酬。然而，如果不公平是通过公正的程序来决定的，成年人会允许这种不公平，这表明他们重视程序正义。目前还不清楚儿童在分配资源时是否重视程序正义。我们调查了 5 至 8 岁的儿童，如果他们可以使用公正的程序，是否会自愿在两个接受者之间制造不公平。在实验 1 中，孩子们更愿意使用公正的程序（旋转一个轮子，让两个接受者都有平等的机会获得资源），而不是部分程序（旋转一个轮子，让一个接受者获得资源的机会大得多）。在实验 2 和 3 中，孩子们更愿意使用相同的公正程序将资源分配给两个接受者中的一个，即使通过将资源扔进垃圾桶来保持平等的选择也是如此。重要的是，当唯一的另一个选择是部分程序时，孩子们宁愿将资源扔进垃圾桶来维护平等。年龄较大的孩子比年龄较小的孩子更不愿意使用部分程序。这些结果表明，儿童在整个童年中期越来越重视程序正义，他们的公平关切可能更多地是避免偏袒，而不是不公平本身。
