How intergroup context shapes children's decision to compensate and punish unfairness

Children care deeply about fairness but live in a world where unfairness occurs. For example, someone might selfishly hoard resources, refusing to share. When this happens, children who are bystanders face a choice: They can punish the selfish actor by taking away resources, help the disadvantaged actor by giving them resources, or do nothing and let the unfairness persist. The focus of this study is which option children choose when confronted with unfairness and how their decisions shift depending on social group dynamics. We gave 6- to 9-year-olds (N = 148) the chance to respond to unfairness in a series of scenarios. Each child was assigned to a minimal group and observed situations in which resources were shared either fairly or unfairly between two individuals. Crucially, we manipulated the group membership of both the unfair divider and the disadvantaged receiver. Children were more inclined to punish when the unfair divider was an outgroup member (relative to an unfair ingroup divider)-but only if they showed strong ingroup favoritism. Additionally, when the disadvantaged receiver was an ingroup member, children were more likely to intervene either by punishing or by compensating. These findings reveal that children's decisions to compensate or punish unfair others are shaped by their social allegiances, offering new insights into how group biases influence consequential social decisions from a young age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).