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

Abstract

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. Prompt condition had a strong effect on advantageous but not disadvantageous inequity aversion. Indeed, a simple fairness prompt was enough to reveal advantageous inequity aversion at 5 years of age, roughly 2 years before it was seen in children in the Autonomous Prompt or Baseline conditions. This study points to the promise of simple prompts as a powerful means of encouraging costly fair behavior in childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).