Based on “Children’s Recognition of Fairness and Other’s Welfare in a Resource Allocation Task: Age Related Changes” By Michael T Rizzo, Laura Elenbaas, Shelby Cooley, and Melany Killen
Letha Plecker
Colorado State University
Introduction
Moral development is necessary for the everyday social situations in the world. It is the ability for children to develop attitudes and feelings towards others in society based on their experiences, culture, and social rules. Moral development begins to expand as the brain develops and children are exposed to various social experiences. In the study done by Michael T Rizzo and Laura Elenbaas and Shelby Cooley and Melany Killen, their research looks at moral development through the allocation …show more content…
Michael Rizzo, Laura Elenbaas, and Melanie Killen belong to the department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland and Shelby Cooley belongs to the Community Center for Education Results in Seattle, Washington (Rizzo, Elenbaas, Cooley, & Killen, 2016). Because of previous research on the matter, the authors decided to divide the children into two age categories, three to five and six to eight years old. This was done to show the progression of complex thinking during research allocation. The children were then introduced to fictional characters “Mug” and “Wump” and were also introduced to their fictional resource, “blickets”. The blickets were described to children as either “necessary”, meaning having or not having them could impact the physical well-being of the characters, or “luxury” meaning that the characters liked them, but did not need them” (Rizzo et all., 2016, p. 5-6). The children were then told that Mug and Wump went out to search for blickets and Mug is lazy and does not look for blickets but Wump works hard to find blickets. The children are then asked to distribute six blickets between the hardworking character and the lazy character and then are asked why they chose to distribute them that way. Rizzo et all. (2016) found that the children gave four different reasons for allocating the resources, merit, equality, other’s welfare, and