My Research
My research examines how children and adults reason about fairness, inequality, expectations, and emotions in social and moral decision-making. I investigate how individuals evaluate different types of outcomes and inequality while considering the role of emotions, social norms, and beliefs about agency. My work also explores developmental and cross-cultural perspectives, such as how children in the U.S. and China perceive and justify inequalities in household labor. A key focus of my research is on how expectations shape emotional experiences, particularly whether managing expectations can help mitigate disappointment. Additionally, I examine how parenting styles, such as authoritative versus permissive approaches, shape children’s beliefs about agency and fairness, influencing their resource allocation decisions. More broadly, I investigate how emotions function as sources of information in moral reasoning, particularly how perspective-taking and emotional attributions influence children’s fairness judgments. By integrating insights from developmental psychology, moral reasoning, and social cognition, my work contributes to understanding how fairness and inequality perceptions develop and how they are shaped by cultural and emotional contexts.
Children Consider Procedures, Outcomes, and Emotions When Judging the Fairness of Inequality
In our 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, we examined how children’s fairness judgments develop, particularly how they weigh procedural fairness, outcomes, and emotions. Grounded in theories of moral development, our research explored whether children rely more on objective fairness rules (e.g., whether a fair procedure was followed) or subjective factors like emotional impact. Our results showed that younger children were more likely to accept inequality if it resulted from a seemingly fair process, whereas older children increasingly considered the emotional consequences of unfair outcomes. As they matured, children judged scenarios as less fair when one recipient was visibly upset, even if the distribution followed an impartial rule. These findings suggest a developmental shift from rule-based reasoning to a more nuanced understanding of fairness that incorporates social and emotional considerations, emphasizing the growing role of empathy in moral evaluations.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
US and Chinese preschoolers normalize household labor inequality
In our 2023 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we examined how children aged 3 to 10 from the United States and China perceive the distribution of household labor. We found that even at the youngest ages, children are keen observers of their family’s dynamics, noting that mothers often perform the majority of household tasks. Both the children and their caregivers generally viewed this unequal distribution as fair, indicating an early normalization of gendered labor roles. These findings suggest that children internalize societal norms regarding household responsibilities from a very young age, underscoring the importance of addressing gender equality within the home to foster more balanced perceptions in future generations.
Authoritative Parenting and Beliefs in Agency Impact Children's Views on Fairness and Inequality
In our recent study presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, we explored how young children perceive different types of inequality, particularly when disadvantage arises from merit-based effort versus a single suboptimal choice (self-chosen inequality). We found that children aged 4 to 8 were more likely to compensate individuals disadvantaged due to self-chosen inequality than those disadvantaged by merit-based effort, suggesting they viewed the former as less deserving of punishment. Qualitative analyses revealed that children’s fairness judgments were influenced by whether they attributed inequality to personal choice or external constraints—those who cited external constraints were more likely to view inequality as unfair and to redistribute resources accordingly. Additionally, parenting style played a role: older children with permissive parents were more likely to see inequality as unfair, while authoritative parenting was linked to stronger free-will beliefs, shaping children’s expectations about norm-violating actions. These findings highlight how children’s developing fairness judgments are shaped by both their beliefs about agency and the socialization influences of parenting.
Ongoing research
Currently, I am collaborating on social developmental and philosophical projects that are in varying stages of the publication process:
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1. Revising John Rawls's moral development foundations in A Theory of Justice
2. Understanding how experience with inequality affects support for equity-based resource allocation and wealth redistribution
3. Investigating how children reason about the effect of sequential expectations on emotional outcomes
4. Determining the effect of requests on children’s prosocial motivation in a cross-cultural study
