Nature & Nurture #14: Dr. Nadia Chernyak - How Children Quantify Fairness

The Nature & Nurture Podcast

Dr. Nadia Chernyak is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. In this episode we discuss her research on children's moral development, conceptions of fairness and inequality, and the role numeracy skills play in these conceptions. Learn more about Dr. Chernyak's research at: https://www.dosclab.com/

Video available at: https://youtu.be/MOjgJGU-KW4

Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 0:35 - How Nadia became interested in studying moral and social development 1:48 - Psychology vs. philosophy 2:48 - Conducting psychological experiments with young children 4:06 - Inequalities perceived by young children and even monkeys 8:55 - When and how children begin to apply moral stances to inequality 10:42 - Nadia's research on children's moral cognition 14:24 - Is the motivation for sharing innate? 15:28 - How temperament influences moral values 16:37 - Why Nadia focuses her research on children 17:45 - Looking at numeracy development in the context of fairness and morals 22:18 - How perceptions of inequality scale 25:26 - Cognitively advanced but selfish children 27:05 - Merit vs. equality 28:30 - Practical implications of Nadia's research 31:01 - The difficulty of comparing unquantifiables 32:18 - Cognitive mechanisms behind the development of high-level reasoning 34:00 - Moral stage theory 34:53 - Moral thought experiment 36:32 - Fairness vs. prosociality 40:09 - Group biases in prosocial behavior 42:20 - Overlap between moral psychology and moral philosophy 46:02 - Creating quantifiable scales of unquantifiables 49:00 - Evaluating ulterior motives 51:18 - Nadia's plans for future research 55:10 - How stereotypes influence cognition