Dr.Jessica　Sommerville　(Professor at Washington University)

タイトル：The development of fairness concerns in the first two years of life

要旨

　For adults, concerns about fairness are central moral considerations, and thus play an integral role in interpersonal interactions and societal decision making. In my talk, I focus specifically on the development of distributive fairness concerns over the first two years of life. I argue that infants’ distributive fairness concerns emerge in the first year of life, related to the onset of infants’ naturalistic sharing behavior. Moreover, I demonstrate that distributive fairness concerns in infancy increasingly take on many features common to more mature representations of fairness. For example, they contain evaluative components, vary in strength from individual to individual, and are weighed against competing social and moral concerns. Nevertheless recent evidence suggests that infants’ distributive fairness concerns may depart from those of adults in important ways, such as the extent to which such concerns prompt reward and punishment behavior. Together these findings provide new information about the developmental origins of a sensitivity to fairness: infants’ distributive fairness concerns are developmentally emergent, experientially dependent, and individually variable.