As any parent knows, children watch carefully when goodies are divvied up. A few years ago, a team of psychologists set out to study how kids too young to wield the word \u201cunfair\u201d would respond to unfairness. They recruited a bunch of preschoolers and grouped them in pairs. The children were offered some blocks to play with and then, after a while, were asked to put them away. As a reward for tidying up, the kids were given stickers. No matter how much each child had contributed to the cleanup effort, one received four stickers and the other two.<\/p>\n
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children shouldn\u2019t be expected to grasp the idea of counting before the age of four. But even three-year-olds seemed to understand when they\u2019d been screwed. Most of the two-sticker recipients looked enviously at the holdings of their partners. Some said they wanted more.<\/p>\n
A number of the four-sticker recipients also seemed dismayed by the distribution, or perhaps by their partners\u2019 protests, and handed over some of their winnings. \u201cWe can … be confident that these actions were guided by an understanding of equality, because in all cases they offered one and only one sticker, which made the outcomes equal,\u201d the researchers reported.<\/p>\n
The results, they concluded, show that \u201cthe emotional response to unfairness emerges very early.\u201d<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
From “The Psychology of Inequality,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker magazine, January 15, 2018, page 31.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As any parent knows, children watch carefully when goodies are divvied up. A few years ago, a team of psychologists set out to study how kids too young to wield the word \u201cunfair\u201d would respond to unfairness. They recruited a bunch of preschoolers and grouped them in pairs. The children were offered some blocks to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[898,897,482],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7934"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}