Trends in Cognitive Sciences | 2019
Children’s Sense of Fairness: Respect Isn’t Everything
Abstract
Recent empirical work has provided new insight into the origins of distributive, procedural, and retributive justice. Engelmann and Tomasello [1] offer an overarching framework that attempts to explain these different aspects of fairness as deriving from a single core process – a desire for mutual respect. While we applaud this integrative attempt, we point out two outstanding challenges. First, although collaboration engenders fairness concerns, children still show a self-centered bias in their response to inequality. Second, children are often surprisingly focused on distributional outcomes without much regard to the history of how they came about, calling into question whether equal respect alone can account for children’s emerging fairness concerns.