Toddlers show heightened attention to selective distributors

We investigated whether Norwegian 21-month-olds (N = 176) hold expectations about agents' dominance based on their distributive fairness (data collected during 2021–2024). Toddlers were presented with two agents who first distributed resources, one acting evenly/fairly and the other selectively/unfairly. Then the agents engaged in territorial competition (Experiment 1). Toddlers looked longer when the unfair, selective agent prevailed and gained center-stage visibility. Experiment 2 ruled out the influence of low-level non-social factors. In Experiments 3 and 4, toddlers watched distributive events like in Experiment 1, but unlike earlier experiments, the test phase did not include competition. Toddlers again looked longer at the selective distributor when it gained center-stage visibility. Overall, these results suggest that toddlers pay special attention to unfair, selective distributors at large, also in the absence of dominance conflict or a clear violation event during the test phase.