Children's biased evaluations of lucky versus unlucky people and their social groups

Hurricanes strike some houses and spare others, lotteries are won and lost, and children are born into wealthy and poor families. Rationally, there is no reason to prefer people who are lucky to those who are unlucky. In fact, the explicit codes of ethics by which modern societies govern themselves emphasize neutrality or even a favoring of the least advantaged (Rawls, 1971). But rationality is not always a quality of human minds (Simon, 1957; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and this is so even when decisions involve the dimension of right versus wrong (Banaji & Bhaskar, 2000). Understanding how children think about other people who experience luck or misfortune can provide a window into the origins of attitudes and preferences toward social groups that vary in privilege. Accordingly, we tested children's preferences for lucky versus unlucky individuals. Then we pushed further to test the generalization of such preferences beyond the individuals themselves to others who shared a group marker (same colored T-shirt).