© Bérangère Testud During a first experiment, the scientists asked children aged from 3 to 8 years to watch a playlet involving a series of interactions between two puppets, one of which always imposed his will on the other, so that the children recognized him as the "boss". The scientists then gave each child a large and a small piece of chocolate, and watched how he or she distributed these sweets to each puppet.
As they grow up, do children become young Robin Hoods? Depending on their age, they do not allocate resources in the same way between dominant and subordinate individuals. Thus a tendency towards egalitarianism develops and becomes even stronger between the ages of 5 and 8 years. These findings by a team of scientists from the CNRS and the Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France), Lausanne and Neuchâtel (Switzerland) universities provide a clearer understanding of how the notion of equality develops in human beings, and of their sense of justice. It is published on 26 September 2016 in Developmental Psychology . Hierarchical relationships are one of the characteristics of our social existence. At a very early age, children can detect the difference between dominant and subordinate individuals. But how do they behave towards this asymmetric ranking? Will they favor the dominant and thus preserve the status quo ? Or will they focus more on the subordinate and thus institute a form of equality? How do these positions evolve during childhood? - Scientists in the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) and the universities of Lausanne and Neuchâtel have examined the early signs of this political positioning in children aged from 3 to 8 years by means of two experiments: a resource giving task and a resource taking task.
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