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. 2016 Jul-Aug;21(4):478-504.
doi: 10.1111/infa.12117. Epub 2015 Sep 30.

Infants Associate Praise and Admonishment with Fair and Unfair Individuals

Trent D DesChamps  1 , Arianne E Eason  1 , Jessica A Sommerville  1
Affiliations

Infants Associate Praise and Admonishment with Fair and Unfair Individuals

Trent D DesChamps et al. Infancy. 2016 Jul-Aug.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that infants possess a rudimentary sensitivity to fairness: infants expect resources to be distributed fairly and equally, and prefer individuals that distribute resources fairly over those that do so unfairly. The goal of the present work was to determine whether infants' evaluations of fair and unfair individuals also includes an understanding that fair individuals are worthy of praise and unfair individuals are worthy of admonishment. After watching individuals distribute goods fairly or unfairly to recipients, 15-month-old (Experiments 1 and 2) and 13-month-old (Experiment 3) infants took part in a test phase in which they saw only the distributors' faces accompanied by praise or admonishment. Across all experiments, infants differentially shifted their visual attention to images of the fair and unfair distributors as a function of the accompanying praise or admonishment, although the direction in which they did so varied by age. Thus, by the start of the second year of life, infants appear to perceive fair individuals as morally praiseworthy and unfair individuals as morally blameworthy.

Keywords: fairness; infancy; moral evaluation; morality.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Proportion looking to the unfair distributor in the Praise and Admonishment conditions of Experiment 1 (15-month-old infants). Error bars represent ± 1 SE. *p<.05
Figure 2
Figure 2
Proportion looking to the unfair distributor in the Praise and Admonishment test trials of Experiment 2 (15-month-old infants). Error bars represent ± 1 SE. *p<.05
Figure 3
Figure 3
Proportion looking to the unfair distributor in the Praise and Admonishment conditions of Experiment 3 (13-month-old infants). Error bars represent ± 1 SE. *p<.05
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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