Effort or outcome? Children's meritorious decisions.

How individuals determine what is fair and just when allocating resources is a fundamental aspect of moral development. Decisions about fairness involve considerations such as merit, which includes effort (one's own exertion to achieve a goal) and outcome (one's product). Previous research has described merit in terms of both effort and outcome (e.g., a meritorious individual is both hard-working and productive). Crucially, no research has documented whether children give priority to being hard-working (high effort) or to being productive (high outcome or product) when allocating resources. This gap in the literature obfuscates two constructs that reflect how individuals allocate resources. The current study examined this process by which children (3- to 10-year-olds, N = 100; Mage = 7.27 years, SD = 2.39) weighed these two different aspects of merit in their fairness decisions in several situations where levels of effort and outcome were varied. When there was a discrepancy between effort and outcome, children increasingly prioritized effort over outcome with age and allocated more resources to hard-working peers than to productive peers. Effort and outcome were also examined. In situations where only effort varied (i.e., outcome was controlled), with age children were more likely to incorporate effort into their fairness decisions; however, in situations where only outcome varied (i.e., effort was controlled), with age children were less likely to incorporate effort into their fairness decisions. Taken together, the findings suggest that as children get older, they increasingly focus on effort of individuals rather than on their productivity when distributing resources.

When and Why Parents Prompt Their Children to Apologize: The Roles of Transgression Type and Parenting Style.

Young children are sensitive to the importance of apologies, yet little is known about when and why parents prompt apologies from children. We examined these issues with parents of 3-10-year-old children (N = 483). Parents judged it to be important for children to apologize following both intentional and accidental morally-relevant transgressions, and they anticipated prompting apologies in both contexts, showing an 'outcome bias' (i.e., a concern for the outcomes of children's transgressions rather than for their underlying intentions). Parents viewed apologies as less important after children's breaches of social convention; parents recognized differences between social domains in their responses to children's transgressions. Irrespective of parenting style, parents were influenced in similar fashion by particular combinations of transgressions and victims, though permissive parents were least likely to anticipate prompting apologies. Parents endorsed different reasons for prompting apologies as a function of transgression type, suggesting that they attend to key features of their children's transgressions when deciding when to prompt apologies.