The power of prompts: Encouraging children to think about fairness promotes the costly rejection of unfairness.

Children in the United States have an early-emerging understanding that resources should be divided fairly among agents, yet their behavior does not begin to reflect this understanding until later in development. Why does this gap between knowledge and behavior exist, and how can we close it? Here, we tested the role of explicit prompts in closing the gap, asking whether prompting 4- to 9-year-olds to make fair decisions would promote the costly rejection of unfairness in the Inequity Game. Children were presented with either advantageous (more for actor, less for recipient) or disadvantageous (less for actor, more for recipient) allocations and assigned to one of three experimental conditions: Fairness Prompt, Autonomous Prompt, or Baseline.

Beliefs about social mobility in young American children.

Although actual experiences of upward social mobility are historically low, many adolescents and adults express a belief in social mobility (e.g., that social status can change).

Early perceptions of COVID-19 intensity and anti-Asian prejudice among White Americans.

Anecdotal reports suggested an uptick in anti-Asian prejudice corresponding with the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining responses from White U.S.

Children strategically conceal selfishness.

Can children exploit knowledge asymmetries to get away with selfishness? This question was addressed by testing 6- to 9-year-old children (N = 164; 81 girls) from the Northeastern United States in a modified Ultimatum Game. Children were assigned to the roles of proposers (who offered some proportion of an endowment) and responders (who could accept or reject offers). Both players in the Informed condition knew the endowment quantity in each trial.

Author Correction: Children avoid inefficient but fair partners in a cooperative game.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Children avoid inefficient but fair partners in a cooperative game.

Human adults use a range of social cues to obtain information about potential partners in cooperative contexts: we prefer partners who are competent, wealthy and generous, and those who abide by moral and social rules. One factor that carries particular weight is whether a prospective partner is fair. Here we ask whether children share this preference for fair partners and, if so, whether a prospective partner's past fair behaviour influences children's behaviour in a cooperative dilemma.

Ingroup bias does not influence inequity aversion in children.

Ingroup favoritism influences third-party norm enforcement: Third-party punishers are more lenient when an ingroup member has been unfair. By contrast, in 2-party contexts, where punishers are the victims of unfairness, group bias effects are absent or inconsistent. Thus, group bias appears to be particularly influential when enforcing fairness among others, but less so when protecting oneself from unfairness.

Worth the wait: Children trade off delay and reward in self- and other-benefiting decisions.

Human prosocial behaviors are supported by early-emerging psychological processes that detect and fulfill the needs of others. However, little is known about the mechanisms that enable children to deliver benefits to others at costs to the self, which requires weighing other-regarding and self-serving preferences. We used an intertemporal choice paradigm to systematically study and compare these behaviors in 5-year-old children.