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Abstract

Fairness influences social interactions from infancy to adulthood. However, the ways in which people conceive of fairness differs across ages and contexts. In this dissertation, I explore the developmental trajectory of fairness preferences across cultures and examine the impact of various contextual factors – from country to wealth to recipient need - on sharing behaviors and fairness judgments in middle childhood. In Chapter 1, I find that hunger – an aspect of the internal environment – is associated with less sharing of resources but does not change expectations of how others will share. I find no effect of hunger on children’s evaluations of equal and equitable distributions between hungry and full recipients. Children are more likely to endorse equitable distributions as they get older, regardless of their own hunger. In Chapter 2, I also find that children are more likely to endorse equity over equality in third-party distributions as they get older. This age-related trend persists across 13 countries; however, levels of individualism and collectivism within a country – an aspect of the broader social environment - impacts the age at which this shift occurs and the magnitude of the equity preference. In Chapter 3, I examine interactions between the internal and external environment. I consider whether hunger, resource, and income levels interact in three different countries to predict children’s sharing with hungry and full recipients. Children are more likely to share with a hungry over a full recipient as they get older, consistent with the pattern of third-party evaluations in Chapters 1 and 2. Children’s own hunger and income levels do not influence costly sharing in this study, suggesting that children may override their own need in this context, when the recipient is needy, even if they did not do so in Chapter 1, when the recipient was anonymous. Chapters 2 and 3 also highlight variability in the developmental trajectory of fairness preferences across countries. I show that these differences in sharing are not associated with age-related differences in related social cognitive abilities and, instead, suggest that an enhanced awareness of social norms plays an important role in these country-level differences. Taken together, I find that children exhibit flexibility in their conceptions of fairness in middle childhood and argue that heightened sensitivity to social information in the decision context supports mature fairness concerns.

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