Children use partial resource sharing as a cue to friendship Zoe Liberman a,⇑ , Alex Shaw b a Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA b Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA article info Article history: Received 15 August 2016 Revised 1 February 2017 Keywords: Resource distribution Partiality Sharing Friendship Alliances abstract Resource sharing is an important aspect of human society, and how resources are distributed can provide people with crucial informa- tion about social structure. Indeed, a recent partiality account of resource distribution suggested that people may use unequal par- tial resource distributions to make inferences about a distributor’s social affiliations. To empirically test this suggestion derived from the theoretical argument of the partiality account, we presented 4- to 9-year-old children with distributors who gave out resources unequally using either a partial procedure (intentionally choosing which recipient would get more) or an impartial procedure (rolling a die to determine which recipient would get more) and asked chil- dren to make judgments about whom the distributor was better friends with. At each age tested, children expected a distributor who gave partially to be better friends with the favored recipient (Studies 1–3). Interestingly, younger children (4- to 6-year-olds) inferred friendship between the distributor and the favored recip- ient even in cases where the distributor used an impartial proce- dure, whereas older children (7- to 9-year-olds) did not infer friendship based on impartial distributions (Study 1). These studies demonstrate that children use third-party resource distributions to make important predictions about the social world and add to our knowledge about the developmental trajectory of understanding the importance of partiality in addition to inequity when making social inferences. Ó 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.02.002 0022-0965/Ó 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: Liberman@psych.ucsb.edu (Z. Liberman). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 159 (2017) 96–109 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp