Children’s everyday experiences occur against a backdrop that is rich in social information andwhich requires decisions involving considerations about fairness, intentionality, and social groups. With age, children improve in their ability to utilize intentional information in their judgments and have been shown to demonstrate preferences for fairness over group benefit. What has not been fully investigated is how children coordinate and weight these considerations at different ages. Moreover, mistaken intentions and a tendency to benefit the in-group over others can be seen even in adulthood – suggesting that these issues are not so easily overcome and have the potential to affect the evaluations and behaviors of individuals more than have been previously considered. Research designed to carefully investigate the impact of these social and cognitive factors on children’s fairness concepts can provide insight into the ways in which biases may begin to form and potentially inform our understanding of the underlying mechanisms present in prejudicial attitudes. The present dissertation contains a series of three empirical papers that are designed to investigate children’s responses to unintentional and intentional transgressions based on their cognitive ability to infer beliefs of others and their relationship to the group identity of the target. Empirical Study 1 demonstrated the value of using a morally-relevant theory of mind measure embedded directly into the context when predicting children’s responses to unintentional and intentional transgressions. Empirical Study 2 investigated the ways in which children’s assessment of fair and unfair advantages were influenced by the group identity of the character who created the advantage. Empirical Study 3 explored the types of retributive justice that children would endorse in light of various types of intentional and unintentional transgressions, revealing differences based on group identity and the impact that the retributive justice would present to the functioning of the group. The results of these studies together suggest that children’s fairness concepts are heavily influenced by the context in which children find themselves and are far from static. Better understanding the relationship between these factors will provide increased insight into the ways in which prejudice and bias may develop in childhood and suggest potential areas for intervention.