Twenty-eight four-year-old and 28 five- and six-year-old subjects were presented with either poor or rich recipients. The recipients were defined visually with a picture of the type of home they lived in and verbally with a brief story. All subjects were asked to share from 17 units of each of two types of candy, one of low and the other of high value. The subjects assigned poor recipients shared a significantly larger number of units than the subjects assigned rich recipients, and all subjects shared a significantly larger number of the low value items. The age and interaction effects were nonsignificant. The effect of the affluence of the recipient was interpreted in terms of the arousal of empathy.

Thirty-six preschoolers and 41 second graders were asked: (a) to rank, in order of preference, a white child, a black child, and an Indian child as recipients of sharing; (b) to share with the preferred recipient items of low and high value; and (c) to rank the three recipients as companions in several hypothetical, social interaction situations varying in social distance. The distributions of first choices for sharing indicated that the preschool subjects preferred the white recipient most, the Indian recipient next, and the black recipient least, while the second graders preferred the Indian recipient over the white and black recipients. The second graders who preferred the black recipient shared a larger number of items than those who preferred to share with one of the other two recipients. The distributions of first choices for the social distance items were generally consistent with those for sharing, and subjects from one school exhibited some differential sensitivity to the items of the social distance scale. The results of this investigation and those of previous research suggest that the influence of the race of the recipient on sharing behavior varies with the experimental design used.

No abstract