Abstract
Infants’ responses to resource distributions are commonly interpreted as evidence of early fairness expectations and evaluations. We systematically review and meta-analyze this literature and propose an alternative, the relationship account: infants may use allocations to infer how distributors are connected to recipients and whether they are available as potential social partners. Our meta-analyses of the reviewed literature identify an overall reliable tendency for infants to look longer at unequal outcomes and preferentially engage with equal distributors. However, we argue that the current body of evidence does not uniquely establish fairness reasoning. Instead, infants’ responses may stem from preferences, expectations, and predictions grounded in reasoning about relationships. We propose that infants treat a distributor’s allocation as evidence about their relationships with recipients and use this information to assess the potential for themselves seeking relationships with the distributors. We outline experiments that could distinguish between fairness and relationship interpretations of infants’ responses and conclude by highlighting the generative potential of a relationship-focused framework for understanding infant social cognition.