Family Income Affects Children’s Altruistic Behavior in the Dictator Game

Abstract

This study aimed to examine how family income and social distance influence young rural Chinese children’s altruistic behavior in the dictator game (DG). A total of 469 four-year-old children from eight rural areas in China, including many children left behind by parents who had migrated to urban areas for work, played the DG. Stickers comprised the resource, while recipients in the game were assumed to be either their friends or strangers, with the social distance (i.e., strangers compared to friends) as a between-subjects variable. Children donated significantly more stickers to their friends than to strangers. Moreover, children from lower income families donated more stickers than children from higher income families. However, no gender and parental migrant status differences in children’s prosocial behaviors were evident in this sample. Findings of this study suggest that children’s altruistic behaviours to peers are influenced by family characteristics since preschool age. The probable influence of local socialization practices on development and the possible adaptive significance were discussed.

A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

“…More precisely, we found significant curvilinear relations such as a slight u-shaped relation (France) and slight inverted u-shaped relations (Philippines, Great Britain, Latvia), nonsignificant relations (e.g., Denmark, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden), but mainly positive linear relations (e.g., Chile, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Israel). What we did not find, though, were the negative linear effects of social class on volunteering that would be expected on the basis of previous psychological research [1][2][3].…”

“…The previously presented arguments (research outside the field of psychology and the small overall statistical power) are at odds with the "negative effect" hypothesis or at least create the impression that previous results on effects of social class on prosocial behavior [1][2][3] might not be as robust as previously thought. This is why we also analyzed possible moderators that may function as boundary conditions of this effect.…”

“…Social class is predominantly conceptualized as a composition of objective indicators of socioeconomic status (income, education, occupational prestige; [1,3,4,17,62,[69][70][71]), and most studies outside the field of psychology employ at least one of these indicators. But recently and especially inside the field of psychology, research has proposed that social class is not limited to these objective measures of socioeconomic status but instead may also comprise individuals' perception of social standing compared with others in society [1,26,66,69,[72][73][74].…”

“…One of these themes is certainly the effect of social class on prosociality. Recent social psychological research has presented evidence of a negative effect of social class on several prosocial behaviors [1][2][3]. In these studies, higher class individuals were found to be less charitable, less trusting, less generous, and less helpful than lower social class individuals.…”

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.…”