Judgments of the lucky across development and culture

Abstract

For millennia, human beings have believed that it is morally wrong to judge others by the fortuitous or unfortunate events that befall them or by the actions of another person. Rather, an individual's own intended, deliberate actions should be the basis of his or her evaluation, reward, and punishment. In a series of studies, the authors investigated whether such rules guide the judgments of children. The first 3 studies demonstrated that children view lucky others as more likely than unlucky others to perform intentional good actions. Children similarly assess the siblings of lucky others as more likely to perform intentional good actions than the siblings of unlucky others. The next 3 studies demonstrated that children as young as 3 years believe that lucky people are nicer than unlucky people. The final 2 studies found that Japanese children also demonstrate a robust preference for the lucky and their associates. These findings are discussed in relation to M. J. Lerner's (1980) just-world theory and J. Piaget's (1932/1965) immanent-justice research and in relation to the development of intergroup attitudes.

Figure 1

Mean proportion of responses in which participants selected the predicted response in Study 1. The predicted response was selecting the lucky or intentional good actor to perform a good action and selecting the unlucky or intentional bad actor to perform a bad action.

Figure 2

Mean proportion of responses in which participants selected the predicted response in Study 3. The predicted response was selecting the sibling of the lucky or intentional good actor to perform a good action and selecting the sibling of the unlucky or intentional bad actor to perform a bad action.

Figure 3

Mean number of times in Study 4 that children at each age selected the lucky or intentional good actor as nicer than the unlucky or intentional bad actor. A score of 1.5 equals chance. Asterisks indicate the mean differed significantly from chance.

Figure 4

Mean proportion of times in Study 5 that each actor was selected as the “nicer” one across 6 lucky vs. unlucky items and across 6 intentional good vs. intentional bad items in which the option “exactly the same” was also given.

Figure 5

Mean liking rating for intentional good, lucky, unlucky, and intentional bad actors in Study 7 as rated by Japanese children. Higher scores indicate greater liking and error bars indicate standard error of the mean.

Figure 6

Proportion of Japanese children’s responses across items in which they preferred the new member of the intentional good or intentional bad group in the intentional good vs. intentional bad comparisons (left panel) or the member of the lucky or unlucky group in the lucky vs. unlucky comparisons (right panel) in Study 8.