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How do young children perceive what is fair and what is unfair, and how do they behave as a result? Three psychologists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), Tilburg University in the Netherlands and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, show in the journal Communications Psychology that stereotypical gender differences do exist, but that the story is in fact more complicated than that.

Three researchers, who originally all worked at HHU, have examined in more detail how this sense of fairness and unfairness develops in children: Professor Dr. Tobias Kalenscher, Principal Investigator of the Comparative Psychology research team in Düsseldorf, Dr. Lina Oberließen, now at the Wolf Science Center of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, and Professor Dr. Marijn van Wingerden from the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University. They describe behavioral experiments they have conducted with 332 children aged between three and eight.

Professor van Wingerden says, "We did not have ice cream or chocolate though. Instead, the children were paired up and had to award each other smiley stickers. In some cases, we also added additional costs for the allocating child when they e.g. distributed the stickers equally. And then we observed how the children behaved in various gender constellations."

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