Correction: Young Children Consider Merit when Sharing Resources with Others

Young Children Consider Merit when Sharing Resources with Others

MERIT IS A KEY PRINCIPLE OF FAIRNESS: rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task. Previous research suggests that children have an early ability to take merit into account in third-party situations but that merit-based sharing in first-party contexts does not emerge until school-age. Here we provide evidence that three- and five-year-old children already u...

Children consider others' expected costs and rewards when deciding what to teach

Humans have an intuitive sense of how to help and inform others even in the absence of a specific request. How do we achieve this? Here we propose that even young children can reason about others’ expected costs and rewards to flexibly decide what is best for others. We asked children to choose one of two toys to teach to another agent while systematically varying the relative costs and rewards...

Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions

Adults frequently employ reputation-enhancing strategies when engaging in prosocial acts, behaving more generously when their actions are likely to be witnessed by others and even more so when the extent of their generosity is made public. This study examined the developmental origins of sensitivity to cues associated with reputationally motivated prosociality by presenting five-year-olds with ...

Young Children's Sensitivity to Speaker Gender When Learning From Others

Do 12.5-month-old infants consider what objects others can see when interpreting their actions?

The present research examined whether 12.5-month-old infants take into account what objects an agent knows to be present in a scene when interpreting the agent's actions. In two experiments, the infants watched a female human agent repeatedly reach for and grasp object-A as opposed to object-B on an apparatus floor. Object-B was either (1) visible to the agent through a transparent screen; (2) ...