The effects of grade level, context, and family type on male and female adolescents’ distributive justice reasoning

This study investigated ninth and twelfth grade students’ (N=640) distributive justice reasoning. Participants read stories presenting characters that varied in personal characteristics (popularity, productivity, need, and appearance), family type (biologically related/stepsiblings), and context (work/education). Adolescents allocated rewards to story characters, provided rationales for allocations, and judged the fairness of allocation patterns representing different justice principles. Older adolescents were more likely to favor equity and benevolence principles than younger adolescents on all three measures. Older adolescents, especially female students, also took kinship and contextual factors into account more often than younger adolescents. Male students tended to favor equity across conditions; female students’ views of fairness showed greater nuance, varying to a greater degree with relationship and contextual factors. Findings suggest distributive justice reasoning continues to develop through late adolescence, probably due to age-related cognitive and socialization factors and experiences. Further, findings suggest that gender differences in adult justice reasoning arise in adolescence.