“Who is worthy of my generosity?” Recipient characteristics and the development of children’s sharing

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the majority of 8-year-old children share valuable resources equally with others, whereas 4-year-olds are more likely to favor themselves in their sharing allocations. In this study, we examine whether these patterns of sharing behavior are affected by the needs of the recipient or by the recipient’s previous moral or immoral actions. One-hundred and sixty 4- and 8-year-old children had the opportunity to share stickers with hypothetical recipients who were assigned varying characteristics. For both age groups, sharing increased when recipients were needy (i.e., feels sad or has few toys) and morally deserving (i.e., shares with other children and does not push). The differentiation of sharing based on recipient characteristics increased between 4 and 8 years of age, with 8-year-olds also demonstrating decreased sharing when recipients were morally undeserving (i.e., pushes other children and does not share). Our findings provide evidence that children show increased sharing with recipients who are morally deserving and those who demonstrate need. This suggests that children indirectly reciprocate others’ past moral behavior and behave more altruistically towards those with higher need.

Children's neural processing of moral scenarios provides insight into the formation and reduction of in‐group biases

“…Children's age range (4-7 years) was chosen based on previous research indicating that sharing behavior and perspective-taking undergo significant development during these ages (e.g., Imuta, Henry, Slaughter, Selcuk, & Ruffman, 2016;Malti et al, 2016). Three children were excluded for insufficient data after ending the EEG task early, and three additional children were excluded due to excessive artifact in the EEG data.…”

“Wealth Makes Many Friends”: Children Expect More Giving From Resource‐Rich Than Resource‐Poor Individuals

“…Young children use quantitative reasoning and attend to abundance and need when enacting resource distributions and evaluating others' distributions. They preferentially allocate resources to individuals with less over individuals with more (Li et al, 2014;Malti et al, 2016;Paulus, 2014;Zinser & Lydiatt, 1976). When judging "niceness," they attend to the absolute amount given, viewing larger donations as "nicer," and also show sensitivity to the proportion given relative to the total quantity possessed by the giver, at least when not in conflict with the absolute amount given (McCrink et al, 2010; see also Ng, Heyman, & Barner, 2011).…”

The development of children's preferences for equality and equity across 13 individualistic and collectivist cultures

“…By age 3, children endorse norms of equality in third‐party resource allocation tasks where they do not stand to gain in resources (Smith, Blake, & Harris, ). When asked to distribute resources between two anonymous recipients in a distributive justice game, young children prefer equal distributions when no other information about the recipients is available (Malti et al., ). Even when recipients are described as contributing differently to a joint task, young children prefer equality in distributions, in which both partners receive the same amount of resources, compared to equity in distributions, in which recipients are given more resources when they contribute more effort (Baumard, Mascaro, & Chevallier, ).…”

“…In addition to influencing fairness considerations, culture may also affect the age at which children shift from equality to equitybased distribution strategies. Younger children are likely to favor equal distributions in third-party distributive justice games because they understand equality as a basic rule regarding fairness (Malti et al, 2016;Smith et al, 2013). Throughout development, children learn to integrate contextual cues into their determinations of fairness (Meidenbauer, Cowell, Killen, & Decety, 2018;Santamaría-García, González-Gadea, Di Tella, Ibáñez, & Sigman, 2018), become more sensitive to societal norms (House et al, 2013), and are likely to exhibit more equity-based strategies.…”