Fairness in Babies

In this project we are examining how infants think about the moral behaviors of fair and unfair resource distributions. Previous research has demonstrated that early on in life toddlers expect that resources such as items of food will be shared fairly (Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011; Ziv & Sommerville, 2017). For example, they might expect that a person would share four cookies equally between two people by giving them both two cookies instead of giving one three and the other person one cookie. We are interested in assessing similar sharing behaviors but in the novel study environment of an online asynchronous experiment. To do this we use the website LookIt to show infants videos of an agent sharing apples fairly or unfairly with two recipients. We then will measure how long infants look to the fair and unfair events. In addition to assessing infants’ expectations of and preferences for fair resource distributions, we plan to examine how partiality information interacts with fairness expectations and preferences. Previous research has shown that children use partial resource sharing as a cue to friendship (Liberman and Shaw, 2017). We are interested in seeing if friendship information will lead to infants expecting partial resource distributions.

Project Researcher