Fair game: The intuitive economics of resource exchange in four-year olds.

Abstract

Four-year olds participated in versions of adult bargaining games (the ultimatum and dictator games) that were designed to test for understanding of fairness, reciprocity, and altruism and were adapted to be appropriate for their age group. They were also given endowment and theory of mind tasks. The results showed that young children were similar to adults in their preferences for fairness although they tended to make more altruistic offers. They also demonstrated some ability to think strategically about offers as well as some understanding of the importance of reciprocity in bargaining. But their ability to perform a cost-benefit analysis was limited as was their ability to act contingently. A third of the sample showed an endowment effect but whether a child showed this effect did not influence performance in the games. Those who passed theory of mind tasks were more likely to retain their endowment than those who did not. The results are discussed in relation to previous work and support the thesis that individuals may have an early and possibly innate propensity for fairness and altruism.

Resource allocation to kin, friends, and strangers by 3- to 6-year-old children

“…However, other studies have reported marginally positive to positive correlations among children of a similar age range playing the same game (Rochat et al, 2009;Wu & Su, 2014). If a recipient was entitled to accept or reject the shared portion of an endowment, ToM seemed to facilitate sharing in 4-to 6-year-olds (Takagishi et al, 2010) but not in 4-and 5-year-olds (Lucas et al, 2008). However, none of these studies included kin.…”

“…In addition, higher levels of sympathy in 4-year-old children were associated with larger amounts of sharing in dictator games (Ongley & Malti, 2014). However, ToM was also found to be unrelated to children's performance in sharing games (Lucas et al, 2008;Mulvey et al, 2016) and was even related to less sharing because children with ToM might know there were no consequences for not sharing (Cowell, Samek, List, & Decety, 2015). Whereas ToM appears to be cognitively necessary for allocating resources to others because knowing how others feel facilitates considering their interests, kin altruism may be exercised without needing to understand other people's perspectives because one can be unilaterally benevolent toward kin (Lu & Chang, 2009).…”

“…Resource sharing or allocation research often uses indicator games in which a participant, as a proposer, decides whether to share endowed resources with a recipient as well as how many resources to share (e.g., Lucas, Wagner, & Chow, 2008;Sebastián-Enesco & Warneken, 2015;Wittig, Jensen, & Tomasello, 2013) and allocation games in which a proposer selects among different types of resource divisions between a recipient and the self (e.g., Güroglu et al, 2014;House et al, 2013;Moore, 2009). In both paradigms, the amount of sharing increased as children's age increased.…”

Resilience in caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease: A human condition to overcome caregiver vulnerability

“…Stickers (Benenson, Pascoe, & Radmore, 2007;Blake & Rand, 2010;Gummerum, Hanoch, Keller, Parsons, & Hummel, 2010;Lucas, Wagner, & Chow, 2008), food (Brownell, Svetlova, & Nichols, 2009;Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003;House et al, 2012;Markovits, Benenson, & Kramer, 2003), and money (Gummerum, Keller, Takezawa, & Mata, 2008;Harbaugh, Krause, & Liday, 2003;Leman et al, 2009) have been used to investigate cooperative behavior in children, in a variety of experimental designs. However, to our knowledge only one study have recently compared the effect of different kind of resources on cooperation in 3-year-old children and have found no differences (Warneken, Lohse, Melis, & Tomasello, 2010).…”

Four-year-old Children Align their Preferences with those of their Peers

“…Resource distribution tasks like the Dictator Game (DG) have been used to examine fairness and prosocial behavior in young children (Aguilar-Pardo, Martínez-Arias, & Colmenares, 2013; Benenson, Pascoe, & Radmore, 2007;Benozio & Diesendruck, 2015;Blake & Rand, 2010;Chen, Zhu, & Chen, 2013;Gummerum, Hanoch, Keller, Parsons, & Hummel, 2010;Kogut, 2012;Lucas, Wagner, & Chow, 2008;Ongley & Malti, 2014) and typically generate greater variation in responses than binary forced-choice measures. Blake and Rand (2010) have also successfully used the DG to demonstrate that children use their own a priori explicitly stated preferences to guide how they distribute resources.…”