Egalitarian preferences in young children depend on the genders of the interacting partners.

ABSTRACT: In decisions between equal and unequal resource distributions, women are often believed to be more prosocial than men. Previous research showed that fairness attitudes develop in childhood, but their-possibly gendered, developmental trajectory remains unclear. We hypothesised that gender-related fairness attitudes might depend not only on the gender of the Allocator, but also on that of the Recipient. To examine this, we tested 332 three to 8-year-old children in a paired resource allocation task, with both boys and girls acting as Allocators and Recipients. We indeed found gender-related effects: girls more than boys aimed to reduce advantageous inequity, and Allocators of both genders were more averse against male Recipients being better off. Notably, older girls exhibited an envy bias,

SUBMITTER: van Wingerden M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11424646 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature