Children's and adolescents' intuitive judgements about distributive justice: Integrating need, effort, and luck

This study investigated the principles that children and adolescents rely on when allocating a resource fairly. In a series of three experiments, 51 Swiss children (aged 7 and 9 years) and 309 German children (aged 6, 9, and 15 years) participated. A different situational context was presented in ea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:European journal of developmental psychology 2009-07, Vol.6 (4), p.481-498
Main Authors: Kienbaum, Jutta, Wilkening, Friedrich
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescence
Adolescent
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Developmental psychology
Distributive justice
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Information integration
Middle childhood
Moral development
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
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Summary:This study investigated the principles that children and adolescents rely on when allocating a resource fairly. In a series of three experiments, 51 Swiss children (aged 7 and 9 years) and 309 German children (aged 6, 9, and 15 years) participated. A different situational context was presented in each experiment, where luck, need and effort of two protagonists were systematically varied. Primary-school children relied mainly on need when making distributive justice judgements. Effort became more prominent as the allocation principle in adolescence. Equality occurred rarely in all age groups. Integrational capacity and the ability to differentiate between the three situational contexts increased from childhood to adolescence. The data suggest the conclusion that the development of distributive justice decisions has both generalized and context-specific components.
ISSN:1740-5629
1740-5610
DOI:10.1080/17405620701497299