Dimensions

PlumX

How to Cite
Angarita Cáceres, R. G. (2022). Gender differences in experimental studies of resource allowed with the participation of children. Ágora USB, 22(1), 486–508. https://doi.org/10.21500/16578031.4738
License terms

The authors are also adhere to the creative commons license 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.es)

Attribution - NonCommercial - SinDerivar 4.0 International (CC BY - NC - ND 4.0)

Abstract

The article pretends to demonstrate that experimental works that has as a main object to examine the principles of distributive justice in children can be read from their relation with the gender demographic variable. When this critical reading is done from a thematic review it is possible to observe that those studies, in general terms, show findings in three directions: the absence of gender differentiation, non-significant differences and significant differences. These results, however, are directly linked to the participants’ age and to specificities of the experiment methodologies. To give an account of these aspects, the text has been divided in three parts: first-party studies, third-party studies and cultural comparisons.

Keywords:

References

Almås, I., Cappelen, A. W., Sorensen, E. O., & Tungodden, B. (2010). Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance. Science, 328(5982), 1176–1178. doi:10.1126/science.1187300.

Amrhein, V., & Greenland, S. (2017). Remove, rather than redefine, statistical significance. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(1), 4–4. doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0224-0.

Amrhein, V., Greenland, S., & McShane, B. (2019). Scientists rise up against statistical significance. Nature, 567(7748), 305–307. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-00857-9.

Andreoni, J. & Miller, J. (1998). Giving According to GARP: An Experimental Study of Rationality and Altruism. Social Systems Research Institute Working Paper 9902, University of Wisconsin.
Andreoni, J. & Vesterlund, L. (2001). Which Is the Fair Sex? Gender Differences in Altruism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(1): 293–312.

Baumard, N., Mascaro, O., & Chevallier, C. (2012). Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods. Developmental Psychology, 48(2), 492-498.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0026598.

Benjamin, D.J., Berger, J.O., Johannesson, M. et al. (2018). Redefine statistical significance. Nat Hum Behav 2, 6–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0189-z.

Callaghan, T., & Corbit, J. (2018). Early prosocial development across cultures. Current Opinion in Psychology, 20, 102–106. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.039.

Caleo, S. (2018). When distributive justice and gender stereotypes coincide: Reactions to equity and equality violations. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 48(5), 257–268. doi:10.1111/jasp.12510.

Charness, G. & Rabin, M. (2002). Understanding social preferences with simple tests.Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, 817–869.

Chernyak, N., Sandham, B., Harris, P. L., & Cordes, S. (2016). Numerical cognition explains age-related changes in third-party fairness. Developmental Psychology, 52(10), 1555-1562. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000196.

Chevallier, C., Xu, J., Adachi, K., van der Henst, J-B., Baumard. N. (2015). Preschoolers’ Understanding of Merit in Two Asian Societies. PLOS ONE 10(5): e0114717. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0114717.

Choi, J. K. & Bowles, S. (2007) The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science 318, 636–640.

Christensen, J. F., Flexas, A., Calabrese, M., Gut, N. K., & Gomila, A. (2014). Moral judgment reloaded: a moral dilemma validation study. Frontiers in Psychology, 5: 607.doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00607.

Cowell, J. M., Lee, K., Malcolm-Smith, S., Selcuk, B., Zhou, X., & Decety, J. (2016). The development of generosity and moral cognition across five cultures. Developmental Science, 20(4), e12403. doi:10.1111/desc.12403.

Cowell, J.M., & Decety, J. (2015). The neuroscience of implicit moral evaluation and its relation to generosity in early childhood. Current Biology, 25, 1–5.

Debove, S., Baumard, N., & André, J.-B. (2017). On the evolutionary origins of equity. PLOS ONE, 12(3), e0173636. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0173636.

Decety, J., Michalska, K.J., & Kinzler, K.D. (2012). The contribution of emotion and cognition to moral sensitivity: a neurodevelopmental study. Cerebral Cortex, 22, 209–220.

Dickinson, D. and Tiefenthaler, J. (2002). What Is Fair? Experimental Evidence. Southern Economic Journal, 69(2): 414–28.

Dufwenberg, M., and Muren, A. (2006). Gender Composition in Teams. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 61(1): 50–54.

Eagly, A. H., & Crowley, M. (1986). Gender and Helping Behavior. A Meta-Analytic Review of the Social Psychological Literature. Psychological Bulletin, 100(3), 283-308. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.100.3.283.

Eckel, C. C., & Grossman, P. J. (1998). Are women less selfish than men? Evidence from dictator experiments. Economic Journal, 108, 726 – 735.

Eckel, C. C., & Grossman, P. J. (2001). Chivalry and solidarity in ultimatum games. Economic Inquiry, 39, 171 – 188.

Elenbaas, L., & Killen, M. (2016). How do young children expect others to address resource inequalities between groups? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 150, 72–86. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.05.002

Engelmann, J. M., & Tomasello, M. (2019). Children’s Sense of Fairness as Equal Respect. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2019.03.001.

Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., & Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young children. Nature, 454(7208), 1079–1083. doi:10.1038/nature07155.

Fehr, E., Glätzle-Rützler, D. & Sutter, M. (2013). The development of egalitarianism, altruism, spite and parochialism in childhood and adolescence. Eur. Econ. Rev. 64, 369–383.

Gheaus, A. (2016). “Gender and Distributive Justice”, en: Olsaretti, S. (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice. Oxford University Press.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, Harvard, University Press.

Gruen, R. L., Esfand, S. M., & Kibbe, M. M. (2019). Altruistic self-regulation in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104700. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104700.

Harbaugh, W., & Krause, K. (2000). Children’s altruism in public good and dictator experiments. Economic Inquiry, 38(1), 95–109. doi:10.1111/j.1465-7295.2000.tb00006.x.


Henrich, J., Ensminger, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J., Gurven, M., Gwako, E., Henrich, N., Lesorogol, C., Marlowe, F., Tracer, D. and Ziker, J. (2010). Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment. Science 327, 1480-1484.

Hill, K., & Gurven, M. (2004). Economic experiments to examine fairness and cooperation among the Ache Indians of Paraguay. In J. Henrich, R. Boyd, S. Bowles, C. Camerer, H. Gintis, & E. Fehr (Eds.), Foundations in human sociality: Experiments and ethnography in 15 small-scale societies (pp. 382 – 412). Oxford7 Oxford University Press.

Holst, C. (2019). Global Gender Justice: Distributive Justice or Participatory Parity? SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3355607.

House, B. R., Silk, J. B., Henrich, J., Barrett, H. C., Scelza, B. A., Boyette, A. H., Hewlettd, B., McElreath, R., Laurence, S. (2013a). Ontogeny of prosocial behavior across diverse societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(36), 14586–14591.doi:10.1073/pnas.1221217110.

House, B. R., Henrich, J., Brosnan, S. F., & Silk, J. B. (2012). The ontogeny of human prosociality: behavioral experiments with children aged 3 to 8. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(4), 291–308. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.10.007.

House, B., Henrich, J., Sarnecka, B., & Silk, J. B. (2013b). The development of contingent reciprocity in children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(2), 86–93. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.10.001.

Jennings, A. B. (2019). I’ll share with her, but not with you: A mixed methods approach to investigating children’s naïve theories about resource allocation decisions. International Review of Economics Education, 100162. doi:10.1016/j.iree.2019.100162.

Kidd, C., Palmeri, H., & Aslin, R. N. (2013). Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition, 126(1), 109–114. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.004.

Kienbaum, J., & Wilkening, F. (2009). Children’s and adolescents’ intuitive judgements about distributive justice: Integrating need, effort, and luck. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6(4), 481–498.doi:10.1080/17405620701497299.

Killen, M., Lee-Kim, J., McGlothlin, H., & Stangor, C. (2002). How children and adolescents evaluate gender and racial exclusion. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 67(4, Serial No. 271).
Knutsson, M., Martinsson, P., Persson, E., & Wollbrant, C. (2019). Gender differences in altruism: Evidence from a natural field experiment on matched donations. Economics Letters, 176, 47–50. doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2018.12.029.

Li, Y., Li, H., Decety, J., & Lee, K. (2013). Experiencing a natural disaster alters children’s altruistic giving. Psychological Science, 24 (9), 1686–1695. doi:10.1177/09567976 13479975.

Liénard, P., Baumard, N., Mascaro, O., Kiura, P., & Chevallier, C. (2013). Early Understanding of Merit in Turkana Children. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 13(1-2), 57–66. doi:10.1163/15685373-12342084.

Maccoby, E. E. (1990). Gender and relationships: A developmental account. American Psychologist, 45(4), 513–520. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.45.4.513.
Martinsson, P., Nordblom, K., Rützler, D., & Sutter, M. (2011). Social preferences during childhood and the role of gender and age — An experiment in Austria and Sweden. Economics Letters, 110(3), 248–251. doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2010.11.028.

McAuliffe, K., Blake, P. R., Kim, G., Wrangham, R. W., & Warneken, F. (2013). Social Influences on Inequity Aversion in Children. PLoS ONE, 8(12), e80966. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0080966.
McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. V., Daly, M., & Neal, A. (2006). Children’s distributive Justice judgments: Aversive racism in Euro-American children? Child Development, 77, 1063 – 1080. doi: 10.1111 / j.1467-8624.2006.00919.x
McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. V., Watkins, C., & Vinchur, A. J. (1994). The effect of relationship on children’s distributive justice reasoning. Child Development, 65, 1694 – 1700. doi:10.2307/1131288.

McGlothlin, H., Killen, M., & Edmonds, C. (2005). European-American children’s intergroup attitudes about peer relationships. British Journal of Developmental Psychology,23, 227 – 249.

Meuwese, R., Crone, E. A., de Rooij, M., & Güroğlu, B. (2014). Development of Equity Preferences in Boys and Girls Across Adolescence. Child Development, 86(1), 145–158. doi:10.1111/cdev.12290.

Michalska, K.J., Kinzler, K.D., & Decety, J. (2013). Age-related sex differences in explicit measures of empathy do not predict brain responses. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 3, 22–32.

Mischel, W. (1974). “Processes in delay of gratification”. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 7 (pp. 249-292). New York: Academic Press.
Mischel, W., & Metzner, R. (1962). Preference for delayed reward as a function of age, intelligence, and length of delay interval. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 64(6), 425–431. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045046.

Noh, J. Y. (2019). Children’s Developing Understanding of Merit in a Distributive Justice Context. Journal of Child and family studies. Doi: 10.1007/s10826-019-01606-2.

Noh, J. Y., D’Esterre, A., & Killen, M. (2019). Effort or outcome? Children’s meritorious decisions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 178, 1–14. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2018.09.005.

Paulus, M., & Moore, C. (2014). The development of recipient-dependent sharing behavior and expectations about other people’s sharing in preschool children. Developmental Psychology, 50, 914–921. doi:10.1037/a0034169


Pilgrim, C., & Rueda-Riedle, A. (2002). The importance of social context in cross-cultural comparisons: First graders in Columbia and the United States. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 163(3), 283-295.

Robbins, E., Starr, S., & Rochat, P. (2015). Fairness and Distributive Justice by 3- to 5-Year-Old Tibetan Children. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 47(3), 333–340. doi:10.1177/0022022115620487.

Rochat, P. (2005). Humans evolved to become Homo Negotiatus . . . the rest followed. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(5), 714-715.

Rochat, P., Dias, M. D. G., Guo Liping, Broesch, T., Passos-Ferreira, C., Winning, A., & Berg, B. (2009). Fairness in Distributive Justice by 3- and 5-Year-Olds Across Seven Cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(3), 416–442.doi:10.1177/0022022109332844.
Samek, A., Cowell, J. M., Cappelen, A. W., Cheng, Y., Contreras-Ibáñez, C., Gomez-Sicard, N., … Decety, J. (2020). The development of social comparisons and sharing behavior across 12 countries. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 192, 104778. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104778.

Selten, R. and Ockenfels, A. (1998). An Experimental Solidarity Game. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 34(4): 517–39.
Smith, C., & Warneken, F. (2016). Children’s reasoning about distributive and retributive justice across development. Developmental Psychology, 52(4), 613–628. doi:10.1037/a0040069.

Stewart, S. M., & McBride-Chang, C. (2000). Influences on Children’s Sharing in a Multicultural Setting. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 31(3), 333–348. doi:10.1177/0022022100031003003.

Thompson C, Barresi J., y Moore C. (1997). The development of future-oriented prudence and altruism in preschoolers. Cogn Dev 12(2):199–212.

Underwood, B. & Moore, B. (1982). ‘‘The Generality of Altruism in Children,’’ in: The Development of Prosocial Behavior. Eisenberg, N. (Ed). New York: Academic Press, 1982, 25-52.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Cited by