Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Fairness depends on the principles that people use to justifytheir actions, and on the outcomes that they produce. Here wepropose that, from early in childhood, we also judge fairnessbased on whether we believe the resulting outcomes werecaused by the underlying principles. In Experiment 1 we showthat four- five- and six-year-olds believe that an agent who paidattention when distributing resources is more fair than an agentwho was distracted when distributing resources, even whenthey both produce identical outcomes. In Experiment 2 weshow that children of the same ages believe that an agent whocounts when distributing resources is more fair than an agentwho does not count, even when both agents attend to how theydistribute their resources and produce identical outcomes.Together, our findings suggest that children do not judgefairness based on the outcome alone, and they add to a growingbody of work suggesting that, from early childhood, ourintuitions about fairness are tightly linked with intuitions aboutexactness.