How should the towns work?

5- to 12-year-old children

This study will take place on a video call, live with a researcher! Clicking on the “Schedule a time to participate” button will send you to an online calendar where you can select a date and time that works for you. In the study session, your child will be introduced to two fictional cartoon towns and hear a story about how the towns work. Children will hear that one town has rules that each townsperson must pay a certain amount of their earnings to keep the town running, while in the other town, each townsperson decides how much of their earnings they give to the town to keep it running. Children are then asked questions about what they think about each town and the people who live in each town.

The purpose of this study is to understand how children think about rule systems. We want to understand how well children think each town works under different rule systems, and what children think about how people feel under different rule systems. This helps us to understand if children have pre-existing theories on how towns should work, and the fairness of different rule systems.

10 minutes

To thank you and your child for participating, we will send you a $5 Amazon gift card (to Amazon.com) within one week of participation. To be eligible for the gift card, your child must be in the age range for this study, you need to submit a valid consent statement, we need to see that there is a child with you, and your child cannot have participated before in the study. We will send a gift card even if you do not finish the whole study or we are not able to use your child's data.