Origins of understanding fair resource collection

Concerns about fair resource exchanges are pervasive across development. However, existing work has focused primarily on resource distributions. The present experiments investigated whether 14- to 17-month-old North American infants demonstrate expectations for fair resource collection events, in contrast to expectations for resource distribution events. We found that infants' expectations for equal resource collections emerged by 16 months of age, whereas infants at all ages tested expected equal resource distributions. These findings suggest infants possess a broader, early-emerging understanding of fairness as it applies across resource exchanges, while highlighting a slight decalage in reasoning about resource collection versus distribution events.