Group bias in children's merit-based resource allocation.

From early in life, children show sensitivity to both merit and group membership. However, little research has examined how children react to the conflicting demands of allocating meritoriously and favoring in-groups during resource allocation over the course of their development. We compared how children aged 3-5 years and children aged 6-8 years allocated and reasoned about allocations to in-group and out-group members in a merit-based context. In Study 1, in four distribution tasks, children needed to allocate resources to high- and low-merit persons who were either in-group or out-group members and then indicate the reasons for their decisions. In Study 2, we chose the condition where the conflict between merit and group bias was strongest and further tested the effect of merit and group bias. We found that children prioritized merit across conditions, whereas in a context where the conflict was sufficiently intense they also took group membership into consideration. In addition, with age, children incorporated the conflicting demands of merit and group bias during resource allocation. The findings suggest that, with age, children weighed the moral concerns of merit and the social concerns of group bias when determining the allocation of resources.