The impact of social relationships on children’s distributive justice.

= 48) work to deserve the rewards. The children generally showed a positive bias toward their friend; the children gave more resources to their friend than to an equally deserving stranger (Study 1) and distributed resources equally when the friend was less deserving (Study 2a and Follow-Up combined). The children also showed negative bias toward the disliked peer by distributing resources equally when he or she was more deserving than the stranger (Study 2b). The children adhered to merit when distributing between two strangers (Study 1, 2b, combined Follow-Up). These findings suggest that, by 7 years of age, children resolve conflicts between social relationships and merit by basing resource allocation decisions on relationships, but they moderate those decisions depending on the recipients' merit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).