分配公平性指以公平或道德的方式分配资源，是儿童道德发展的重要内容，也是合作和分享行为的基础。“基于贡献的分配”作为公平分配的主要依据，在我国倡导公平公正品格教育背景下尤其值得关注。然而，现实分配情境非常复杂，还受到各种社会因素影响。如对相同贡献的黑人和白人，儿童倾向给黑人更多的奖励，说明社会地位会影响儿童的分配公平性。以往研究缺少对贡献和除种族外其他性质社会地位的综合考察，也缺乏对这种复杂分配行为内在机制的探讨。本研究运用情境实验和ERP技术，综合外显行为、内省策略、大脑活动三类指标，探索儿童在贡献和社会地位冲突情境下进行分配的发展特点及认知和脑机制。实验1-3探讨儿童基于贡献的分配行为和策略及物质和社会资源地位的影响；实验4-5考察心理理论和共情如何影响分配；实验6-7对脑机制进行探索。研究将揭示儿童权衡道德和社会动机进行分配的阶段性、复杂性和个体差异性，为引导儿童公平认知和行为提供依据

Distributive justice concerns how individuals and societies allocate benefits in a fair or moral way. It is important for children’s moral development and considered as the basis of cooperation and sharing behavior. As the main form of fair distribution, merit-based distribution deserves special attention in China which advocates character education of equality and justice. However, the actual distribution situation is much complex and influenced by various social factors. For example, compared with whites, children tended to give more resources to blacks when they made equal merit, indicating that social status can influence children’s distributive justice. Previous studies of race factor have not fully illustrated how children allocate resources in the context when merit and social status are conflicting, and less is known about the mechanisms of such complex distributive behavior. Combining the multiple measures of explicit behavior, introspective strategy and brain activity, this study utilizes novel situation-based experiments and ERP techniques to explore the developmental characteristics, cognitive and neural mechanisms of children’s weighing of merit and social status under Chinese cultural context. In the first three experiments, we examine children’s merit-based resource allocation and explore the roles of material and social resource status. In experiment 4 and 5, we investigate the moderate effect of theory of mind and empathy on children’s resource allocation. In experiment 6 and 7, we use ERP to investigate the neural mechanism of merit-based and social status-related resource allocation. This study will systematically reveal the stages, complexities and individual differences in children’s weighing of moral and social motivation during resource allocation, and provide vital evidence for understanding and guiding the development of children’s fair cognition and behavior.