Child Development
Volume 90, Issue 6 p. 2071-2085
Empirical Article

Getting What You Pay For: Children's Use of Market Norms to Regulate Exchanges

Margaret Echelbarger, 

Corresponding Author

Margaret Echelbarger

University of Michigan

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Margaret Echelbarger, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected].Search for more papers by this author
Susan A. Gelman, 

Susan A. Gelman

University of Michigan

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Charles W. Kalish, 

Charles W. Kalish

University of Wisconsin

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First published: 11 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13088
Citations: 6
We thank the children, their families, and the adults who participated in this research. We are especially grateful to the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History for providing lab space for this research as part of the University of Michigan Living Lab program. We also thank Shahrooz Ali, Diarra Brooks, Leah Butler, Ergest Isak, Avery Katz, Melissa Kreutz, Sarah Snay, Zaria Starfeldt, Anna Wendorf, and Gizem Yagci for their help with data collection and processing. Lastly, we thank Selin Gülgöz for providing access to the stimuli.

Abstract

Children are sensitive to a number of considerations influencing distributions of resources, including equality, equity, and reciprocity. We tested whether children use a specific type of reciprocity norm—market norms—in which resources are distributed differentially based strictly on amount offered in return. In two studies, 195 children 5–10 years and 60 adults distributed stickers to friends offering same or different amounts of money. Overall, participants distributed more equally when offers were the same and more unequally when offers were different. Although sensitive to why friends offered different amounts of money, children increasingly incorporated market norms into their distributions with age, as the oldest children and adults distributed more to those offering more, irrespective of the reasons provided.