In each of two experiments, babies watched live scenarios unfold. In the first, 19-month-olds saw two giraffe puppets dance around at the back of a stage. An experimenter arrived with two toys on a tray and said, \u201cI have toys!\u201d \u201cYay!\u201d said the giraffes. Then the experimenter gave one toy to each giraffe or both to one of them. The infants were timed gazing at the scene until they lost interest. Longer looking times indicated that something was odd\u2014unexpected\u2014to the baby. In this experiment, three-quarters of the infants looked longer when one giraffe got both toys.<\/p>\n In the second experiment, two women faced each other with a pile of small toys between them and an empty plastic box in front of each of them. An experimenter said, \u201cWow! Look at all these toys. It\u2019s time to clean them up.\u201d In one scenario, one woman dutifully put the toys away, while the other kept playing\u2014but the experimenter gave a reward to both the worker and the slacker. In another scenario, both women put the toys away and both got a reward. The observing 21-month-old infants looked reliably longer when the worker and the slacker were rewarded equally.<\/p>\n \u201cWe think children are born with a skeleton of general expectations about fairness<\/strong>,\u201d explains Sloane, \u201cand these principles and concepts get shaped in different ways depending on the culture and the environment they\u2019re brought up in<\/strong>.\u201d Some cultures value sharing more than others, but the ideas that resources should be equally distributed and rewards allocated according to effort are innate and universal.<\/p>\n Other survival instincts can intervene. Self-interest is one, as is loyalty to the in-group\u2014your family, your tribe, your team. It\u2019s much harder to abide by that abstract sense of fairness when you want all the cookies\u2014or your team is hungry. That\u2019s why children need reminders to share and practice in the discipline of doing the right thing in spite of their desires.<\/p>\n Still, says Sloane, \u201chelping children behave more morally may not be as hard as it would be if they didn\u2019t have that skeleton of expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n This innate moral sense might also explain the power of early trauma<\/strong>, Sloane says. Aside from fairness, research has shown that small children expect people not to harm others and to help others in distress<\/strong>. \u201cIf they witness events that violate those expectations in extreme ways, it could explain why these events have such negative and enduring consequences<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: \u201cThat\u2019s not fair!\u201d It\u2019s a common playground complaint. But how early do children acquire this sense of fairness? Before they\u2019re 2, says… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[78,45,160,74,73,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1369"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1371,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions\/1371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/BabywithPuppets.jpg\" "\\"baby\\"")
\u201cThat\u2019s not fair!\u201d It\u2019s a common playground complaint. But how early do children acquire this sense of fairness? Before they\u2019re 2<\/strong>, says a new study. \u201cWe found that 19- and 21-month-old infants have a general expectation of fairness, and they can apply it appropriately to different situations<\/strong>,\u201d says University of Illinois psychology graduate student Stephanie Sloane, who conducted the study with UI\u2019s Ren\u00e9e Baillargeon and David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania. The findings appear in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n