Racial Recipients, Social Distance, and Sharing Behavior in Children

Abstract

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.

Children's Responses to Group-Based Inequalities: Perpetuation and Rectification

“…This work has found that white children as young as preschool-aged share more with White than with Black or Native American recipients (Zinser, Bailey, & Edgar, 1976; Zinser, Rich, & Bailey, 1981). A more recent study combined questions of race-based allocation and children’s developing sense of fairness, asking how children’s allocations to needy or productive workers differed by the race of the recipient.…”

Development of in-group favoritism in children’s third-party punishment of selfishness

“…By early childhood, children favor same-race peers (28,33) and share preferentially with in-group members (34,35). Strikingly, children's in-group bias also extends to "minimal groups" (36), or arbitrary social groups created in the laboratory.…”

The importance of social-cognitive development and the developmental context for group dynamics

“…Furthermore, research has found ingroup favouritism in children’s sharing behavior (e.g., Fehr, Bernhard, & Rockenbach, 2008; Renno & Shutts, 2015). Yet, there also is research on children that found equal sharing between racial ingroup and outgroup members (Kinzler & Spelke, 2011), racial outgroup favouritism in sharing behavior (Zinser, Bailey, & Edgar, 1976), empathy facilitating out-group sharing, helping, and comforting in a competitive intergroup context (Abrams, van de Vyver, Pelletier, & Cameron, 2015), and taking disadvantaged status into account when allocating resources (Elenbaas, Rizzo, Cooley, & Killen, 2016; Rizzo & Killen, 2016). These mixed findings indicate that an intergroup context does not inevitably lead to in-group bias.…”