Reward Allocation in Preschool Children

Lane, Irving M.; Coon, Robert C.

doi:10.2307/1127523

Cited by 82 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…For instance, spontaneous sharing of food was not found among 18-or 25-month-old children in an experimental setting (Brownell et al 2009). Furthermore, 3-to 4-year-olds are generally found to be selfish in their distributions, whereas at 5 to 6 years of age, children show a greater sense of equality and fairness (Fehr et al 2008, Lane & Coon 1972, Rochat et al 2009). However, these experimental studies involved windfall situations in which a child is given some resources by a third party without having to work for them and must relinquish some resources to demonstrate fairness.…”

Section: Toddlers' Second-personal Moralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality

Tomasello

Vaish

2013

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

636

404

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From an evolutionary perspective, morality is a form of cooperation. Cooperation requires individuals either to suppress their own selfinterest or to equate it with that of others. We review recent research on the origins of human morality, both phylogenetic (research with apes) and ontogenetic (research with children). For both time frames we propose a two-step sequence: first a second-personal morality in which individuals are sympathetic or fair to particular others, and second an agent-neutral morality in which individuals follow and enforce group-wide social norms. Human morality arose evolutionarily as a set of skills and motives for cooperating with others, and the ontogeny of these skills and motives unfolds in part naturally and in part as a result of sociocultural contexts and interactions.

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Section: Toddlers' Second-personal Moralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality

Tomasello

Vaish

2013

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

636

404

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“…Investigations of 3-to 5-year-olds' responses in this context have yielded the same mixed results as in the resource-allocation context: When tested with firstparty tasks, preschool children show little sensitivity to merit (they keep more rewards than they should or divide them equally regardless of merit; e.g., Hook & Cook, 1979;Lane & Coon, 1972;Kanngiesser & Warneken, 2012;Lerner, 1974); when tested with third-party tasks, however, children perform better (e.g., Baumard, Mascaro, & Chevalier, 2012;Leventhal, Popp, & Sawyer, 1973;Thomson & Jones, 2005;Tsutsu, 2010). In one third-party experiment, for example, Baumard et al (2012) told 3-and 4-year-olds a simple story illustrated with pictures:…”

Section: Do Infants Expect Individuals To Dispense Rewards Fairly?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Baillargeon¹,

Scott²,

He³

et al. 2015

APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition.

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IntroductionConsider the following scene: A man wearing a backpack is pacing leisurely back and forth in a large airport room. As he strolls, he occasionally crosses his arms, twirls the dangling straps of his backpack, or stuffs his hands in his pant pockets. At one point, he sits down, takes off his backpack, and removes from it a bag filled with assorted gummy bears; as he peers intently inside the bag, he selects and eats, one at a time, five red gummy bears.As adults, we would have no difficulty interpreting the man's actions. We might view his initial actions-pacing, crossing his arms, and so on-as intentional (as opposed to accidental) though not as directed toward any particular goal. In contrast, we might perceive his subsequent actions-removing the bag of gummy bears from his backpack and eating five red ones in succession-as both intentional and goal-directed. In analyzing these actions, we might build an explanation that attributes to the man a causally coherent set of motivational and epistemic mental states: He wants to eat gummy bears, he is particularly fond of red ones, and so when he spies one in the bag, he removes it and eats it.Next, consider a new scene: As the man is happily chewing on red gummy bears, he notices a second man approaching who is carrying two heavy suitcases. At this point, our scene might unfold according to different scenarios. In one, the first man greets the second man, offers to carry one of the suitcases, and holds out his bag of gummy bears. In another scenario, the first man continues to watch the second man but makes no move to approach him. In yet another scenario, the first man sticks out a leg to trip the second man, causing him to fall heavily.As adults, we would interpret and evaluate the first man's actions in the three scenarios very differently. In the first scenario, we might infer that the two men have a social group in common: They might be friends, coworkers, or relatives, for example. In the second scenario, we 3 would conclude that the two men are strangers. In both the first and second scenarios, we would view the first man's behavior as acceptable: Offering help and sharing food are expected prosocial behaviors in interactions with ingroup, but not outgroup, individuals. In contrast, the first man's behavior in the third scenario would seem to us beyond the pale: Unprovoked harmful actions, even against outgroup individuals, are generally viewed as unacceptable. We would categorize the first man as an antisocial lout, and we might file away distinctive characteristics as possible markers of a social group to be avoided in the future.Our discussion of the two scenes above illustrates the rich analyses that adults spontaneously engage in when watching others act. What are the developmental origins of these interpretations? Over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of research on social cognition in infancy. This research can be roughly organized into two sets of questions that map neatly onto the two scenes above. First, when watching an agen...

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“…While preschoolers may typically still espouse principles of equality (all people get the same resources) when verbally interviewed about notions of justice (Damon, 1977), or favor themselves when sharing rewards with unknown partners working in a different room (Hook & Cook, 1979;Lane & Coon, 1972), children as young as 3 years of age do acknowledge differences in merit when distributing resources in less-demanding scenarios. For instance, when prompted to allocate a reward that cannot be divided equally, 3-year-olds prefer to give the bigger portion to the harder-working individual (Baumard et al, 2012).…”

Section: Research Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

Fair Is Not Fair Everywhere

2015

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Distributing the spoils of a joint enterprise on the basis of work contribution or relative productivity seems natural to the modern Western mind. But such notions of merit-based distributive justice may be culturally constructed norms that vary with the social and economic structure of a group. In the present research, we showed that children from three different cultures have very different ideas about distributive justice. Whereas children from a modern Western society distributed the spoils of a joint enterprise precisely in proportion to productivity, children from a gerontocratic pastoralist society in Africa did not take merit into account at all. Children from a partially hunter-gatherer, egalitarian African culture distributed the spoils more equally than did the other two cultures, with merit playing only a limited role. This pattern of results suggests that some basic notions of distributive justice are not universal intuitions of the human species but rather culturally constructed behavioral norms.

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Reward Allocation in Preschool Children

Cited by 82 publications

References 14 publications

Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality

Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Fair Is Not Fair Everywhere

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