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

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