Decisions and mechanisms of intergroup bias in children's third‐party punishment

Abstract

Acknowledgements:We thank Irina Aragon, Carolina Garrigue, and Camila Sturla for their help in data collection. We would also like to thank the director and staff of the Instituto Sagrada Familia and the Science Cultural Center for providing the facilities for this study. Ethics approval:All children included in this study provided a verbally informed assent, and a parent or guardian gave written informed consent on behalf of the child enrolled in the studies. These written informed consents follow the norms of the declaration of Helsinki. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Institute of Cognitive Neurology and the Argentinean Society for Clinical Analyses (SAIC). .

Group membership and adolescents’ third-party punishment: a moderated chain mediation model

“…In other words, adolescents, like children and adults, care about and defend their group membership and are willing to forgive in-group violators. However, Gonzalez-Gadea et al (2022) found that children aged 6 to 9 exhibited an ingroup policing bias but not an ingroup favoritism bias. One potential explanation for the difference is the cost of punishment.…”

“…Like previous research, this study is subject to several limitations. Initially, the third-party punishment game used in our study involves costless self-reported punishment, which might be different from incentivized punishment ( Gummerum et al, 2016 , 2020 , 2022 ; Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2022 ). Future studies should explore how TPP with real monetary incentives are affected by group membership.…”

“…The Mere Preferences Hypothesis suggests that individuals’ positive evaluation toward the ingroup would reduce TPP for ingroup perpetrators, supported by the majority of evidence based on adults ( Yudkin et al, 2016 ; McAuliffe et al, 2017 ; Guo et al, 2020 , 2022 ; Yang et al, 2023 ) and children ( Jordan et al, 2014 ), which supports the ingroup favoritism phenomenon (IGF). The Norms Focused Hypothesis emphasizes that individuals’ concern for maintaining norms of group cooperation would enhance TPP for ingroup violators, as demonstrated by some evidence based on adults ( Mendoza et al, 2014 ; Delton and Krasnow, 2017 ) and children ( Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2022 ), known as the black sheep effect (BSE). Even though they differ in the direction of the effect, IGF and BSE are two ways for people to maintain the group identity and cohesion ( Zhang et al, 2020 ).…”