Maternal Influence on Infants’ Head-Orienting Preferences for Unfair Distributors

Infants show a personal preference for fair over unfair distributors from the first months of life, demonstrating an early sense of distributive fairness. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how such infants’ preferences can be influenced by maternal factors. This study explored the role of maternal social referencing on the development of fairness by presenting 11-month-old infants with familiarization events and a test trial performed by their mothers. Mothers assessed their infants’ preferences by using a forced-choice task, showing specific visual cues (i.e. gaze shift and head turn) to motivate infants to choose unfair over fair distributors (Experiment 1), and without visual cues (Experiment 2). Infants manifested a head-orienting preference for unfair over fair distributors only when their mothers used visual cues. These results provided evidence for the potential influence of maternal visual cues on infants’ orienting preferences for unfair distributors, thereby supporting the role of early social interactions in shifting infants’ attention towards distributors.