Distributive justice pertains to choices that individuals make in allocating resources to themselves and others. The present study, based on data obtained from Filipino and American fifth graders, investigated the similarities and differences in resource distribution in the context of two hypothetical scenarios. The scenarios made salient the norms of merit and need. It was found that although both the Filipino and U.S. children generally preferred to divide the resource equally, they offered quite different explanations for their choices. U.S. children focused on the equal performance of the characters in the scenarios, whereas the Filipino children tended to be more concerned with the interpersonal and emotional consequences of an unequal distribution. Furthermore, U.S. children favored merit-based distributions as their second choice, whereas Filipino children showed a preference for need-based distributions in their second choices. Whereas concern for harmony in interpersonal relationships guided equality- and need-based distributions in the Philippines, an emphasis on performance guided equality- and merit-based distributions in the United States. The findings were examined also in terms of the cultural orientations of individualism and collectivism in the United States and the Philippines, respectively.
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