Empathic emotions, which begin developing in infancy and continue through childhood and beyond (chapters 2-6), are clearly congruent with “caring” and with the “need” version of justice, as just discussed. Besides being congruent, “need” may be linked to empathy by the inductions parents use when children make fun of economically deprived or homeless people (“Don't laugh at him, he can't help it the way he is, he has no home”). Before speculating about socialization's contribution to the links between empathy and “effort” and between empathy and “productivity,” which, as discussed in chapter 9, are less obvious than empathy's link to “need,” a summary of the research on children's distributive justice concepts, apart from empathy, is in order.

“Stages” in Justice Development

The research on what children of different ages view as fair, beginning with Damon's (1977) pioneering work, has yielded a fairly clear consensus about children's notions of fairness, as reflected in their reasoning about distributive justice. In this research, children are typically asked to allocate rewards for work done, to recipients who differ in productivity and other respects. This research reveals a developmental trend from allocating rewards on the basis of selfinterest (and irrelevant factors such as age) in preschoolers; to a strong preference for equal division of rewards at about age 5 or 6; to an increasing emphasis on reward in proportion to productivity or productivity integrated with need (poverty) among older children (Damon, 1977; Hook & Cook, 1979).