COLLEGE PARK, MD (December, 2014) If we have not already learned it from our parents, one of the earliest lessons we learn from our peers is how to share, which is foundational to everything else we learn about the social world and our responsibilities there. It makes intuitive sense, then, that how children think about sharing can speak volumes about their social development and moral reasoning. That intuition is the impetus for a new direction in research at the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology's Social and Moral Development Lab, headed by Professor Melanie Killen.
The UMD Graduate School has freshly awarded Dr. Killen a Semester Research and Scholarship Award for the 2015-16 academic year, and underwritten by that award, she plans to launch a new project to investigate resource allocation in childhood. The project's aim is to examine how children take three central constructs into account when distributing resources: types of resources (luxuries or necessities); claims to resources (equity or merit); and societally consistent or inconsistent inequalities regarding access to resources.
Pictured with Dr. Killen (center) are researchers at the Social and Moral Development Lab, left to right: doctoral students Jeeyoung Noh, Laura Elenbaas, Michael Rizzo, and Shelby Cooley. Photo by Craig Breil.
This new direction is the product of Killen's ongoing work with Developmental Science doctoral students Laura Elenbaas, Michael Rizzo, Shelby Cooley, and Jeeyoung Noh. For instance, one of Killen's projects with Rizzo has been to show that children make different decisions about how to divide up resources that are "luxuries," such as candy and stickers, from ones that are "necessary," such as food or medicine an aspect of resource allocation not previously examined. With Elenbaas, Killens group is conducting a study on whether children take disadvantaged status into account when dividing up necessary resources, such as book supplies to schools with various racial and ethnic makeups.
Rectifying social inequalities is something children begin to think about as early as seven and eight years of age, but very little research has examined it. Yet learning whether children rectify or perpetuate social inequalities when allocating resources can inform educators and parents about how to facilitate conceptions of fairness and reduce prejudice.
The Social and Moral Development Lab will conduct three empirical studies, examining judgments, reasoning, and behavior in children ages three to eleven. The research team intends to examine equality, merit, and justice in contexts for allocation decisions that involve aspects of poverty / wealth, race, and gender.
For Killen, a central question is the extent to which children weigh moral considerations, such as fairness, equality, and equity, with conventional ones, such as societal and group norms which are at the heart of our decisions about how to establish fairness in a group, as well as how we learn to negotiate and bargain. And significantly, this new research will extend her previous work on social exclusion by investigating societal inequality, particularly the pressing moral issues that surround a disadvantaged group's access to needed resources.
Dr. Melanie Killen is Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, where she directs the Social and Moral Development Laboratory. She is the author of Children and Social Exclusion: Morality, Prejudice, and Group Identity and editor of the Handbook of Moral Development. Dr. Killen's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Click here to revisit our winter 2014 Endeavors story on Dr. Killen's research, "A Child's Eye View of Race" (pages 4-7). Or here to visit the Social and Moral Development Lab's website.
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