The development of recipient-dependent sharing behavior and sharing expectations in preschool children.

Abstract

This study investigated the development of sharing expectations and sharing behavior in 3 groups of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. We examined (a) whether preschool children expect a person to share more with a friend than with a disliked peer and (b) whether their expectation about others' sharing behavior depends on whether there is a cost or not. Additionally, (c) we assessed children's own sharing behavior toward the different recipients in the same situation. The results show that expectations about sharing and actual sharing follow similar developmental pathways and that recipient-dependent sharing and sharing expectations emerge around 4 years of age. Moreover, individual-level analyses provide evidence that by 5 years of age, children's own sharing and their expectations of others' sharing are closely related to each other.

How do young children expect others to address resource inequalities between groups?

“…Thus, children may begin to recognize the roles of fairness considerations, ingroup preferences, and group status differences in others' allocation decisions during early childhood as well. Some previous research supports this possibility, with one study finding evidence for preschoolers' recognition that advantaged groups are less supportive of equality than they are (Cooley & Killen, 2015) and two studies suggesting that expectations for ingroup bias in others' resource allocation decisions emerge between 3 and 6 years of age (DeJesus et al, 2014;Paulus & Moore, 2014). What is not known is how group status (advantaged or disadvantaged), expected group preferences, and expected evaluations of a preexisting inequality interact to predict young children's expectations for others' resource allocation decisions.…”

“…Specifically, we predicted that 5-and 6-year-olds who expected the allocator (from the disadvantaged or advantaged group) to prefer the ingroup over the outgroup would also expect that individual to allocate more resources to the ingroup (H1). Related research indicates that by 5 years of age (but not before), young children expect ingroup bias in intergroup allocation scenarios (DeJesus et al, 2014;Paulus & Moore, 2014). Expanding on this previous work, however, we hypothesized that mere membership in a group would not be expected to result in preferential allocation to the ingroup.…”

“…For example, one study found that, whereas 3-year-olds expected a protagonist to share equally at the same rate regardless of who the potential recipient was, 5-year-olds expected equal sharing among friends approximately 90% of the time and equal sharing with disliked peers approximately 40% of the time (Paulus & Moore, 2014). Furthermore, one study found that 4-to 10-year-olds increasingly expected members of school groups in competition to allocate more cookies to their ingroups rather than dividing equally between groups (DeJesus, Rhodes, & Kinzler, 2014).…”

Ethics and economics: A comment on Narvaez‘s “Revitalizing human virtue by restoring organic morality”

“…By taking others' perspective and trying to act not only on one's own, but also on the other's behalf, you are happy also about the other being happy. Knowing what is yours is also a necessary condition for being able to share with others (see Hay, 2006), which is the subsequent moral principle (see Paulus & Moore, 2014;Warneken & Tomasello, 2013). And vice versa, children can only demand that others ought to share with them, if they understand that the relevant items belong to the others.…”

Age-Related Changes in Children's Resource Giving: How Social Categories and Fairness Considerations Influence Distribution Decisions

“…One area where in-group preferences also seem to manifest in children"s behaviour is in resource distribution. However, most studies to date have focused on arbitrarily or minimally assigned groups (e.g., Benozio & Diesendruck, 2015) and comparisons of resource giving between known versus unknown recipients, establishing children reliably give more resources (both when the resources are their own or not) to friends, family members and class mates, compared to disliked or unfamiliar peers (Lu & Chang, 2016;Moore, 2009;Paulus & Moore, 2014). Intuitively, this is not surprising, as researchers have suggested behaving in this way can assist in reinforcing social ties and benefit the overall well-being of the group (Rutland & Killen, 2017).…”