Awareness shapes fairness: how Children's emotion atributions reflect sensitivity to unequal treatment

How do children reason about fairness when transgressors receive different consequences for the same misdeed? In a pre-registered study with N = 122 participants at 6 to 9 years, we investigated how children evaluate unequal norm enforcement (punishment vs. leniency) and how they integrate a transgressor's knowledge state about the inequality into their emotion attributions. Results showed that children revised their emotion attributions depending on whether the transgressor was aware of being treated differently. Children initially attributed happiness to an unpunished transgressor or sadness to a punished transgressor. However, they subsequently attributed mixed emotions such as guilt or sadness combined with relief to transgressors who learned about the inequality but not to transgressors who only knew about the punishment to the self. These results suggest that children reflect not only on the consequences to the individual but also on the transgressors' knowledge about whether a meta-norm of equality has been violated.