It’s not unusual to hear the phrase “No fair!” when spending time with children. But two back-to-back MSU studies found that 4-year-olds may not view unfairness as a clear-cut moral violation — except for when the harm was explicitly highlighted to them.
Both studies, published in Social Cognition and Behavioral Sciences, challenge the long-held assumption that children instinctively view unfairness as a moral violation on par with physical harm.
Researchers presented 4-year-olds and adults with short scenarios involving different norm violations including moral rule violations like physical or property harm, fairness rule violations like getting fewer resources than others, and social rule violations like breaking a dress code.
Children and adults were then asked to rate how serious each violation was. Across both studies, children rated unfairness more like a social misstep than a moral one.
“For a long time, researchers have assumed children naturally see unfairness as morally wrong. Our work challenges that assumption,” said Meltem Yucel, co-author of both studies and faculty at MSU’s Department of Psychology. “If children don’t immediately moralize unfairness the way they do physical harm, it has real implications for how we raise morally sensitive, fairness-conscious kids. It also raises important questions about why tolerance for inequality can persist, and what we might do about it from an early age.”
But when the researchers told the kids that someone was sad because they received fewer resources, the kids shifted and rated the unfairness as seriously as a moral violation. Adults consistently rated unfairness to be alongside social violations regardless of whether the harm was emphasized.
“When harm is made visible and concrete by saying that the recipient of inequality was sad, children respond,” said Yucel. “This highlights the possibility that there may be real, actionable ways to help children and even adults to become more attuned to injustice.”
The researchers hope that this opens new conversations about how children are socialized to recognize and push back on inequality, as well as prompting researchers to revisit assumptions about how fairness fits into moral development.