Infants reason about deserving agents: A test with distributive actions

- Infants can attend to agents' deservingness in distributive contexts.
- At 20 months infants expect deservingness congruent distributions.
- Deservingness may trump egalitarian principles in infants' reasoning.

The ability to attend to agents' deservingness and merit is a fundamental aspect of human moral judgment. To investigate the origins of this ability, we recorded 15- and 20-month-old infants' reactions to deservingness congruent and incongruent distributions performed towards pairs of helping and hindering agents. Twenty-month-old infants looked longer at equal distributions performed towards not equally deserving recipients than at equal distributions performed towards equally deserving agents and they looked equally long at equal and unequal deservingness congruent distributions. These results suggest that infants' are able, at least in some simple contexts, to take into account the valence of previous actions and expect agents to treat others in accord with their deservingness.