Children use partial resource sharing as a cue to friendship
1Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|March 13, 2017
Summary
Children infer friendships from unequal resource distribution. Even with random methods, younger children see friendship, while older children link friendship only to intentional partiality.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Social Cognition
Background:
- Resource distribution offers insights into social structures.
- Partiality in resource distribution may signal social affiliations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To empirically test if children infer social affiliations from unequal resource distribution.
- To investigate the developmental trajectory of understanding partiality in social inferences.
Main Methods:
- Children aged 4-9 observed distributors giving resources unequally via partial or impartial procedures.
- Participants judged the distributor's friendships based on the distribution method.
Main Results:
- Children consistently inferred friendship between a distributor and a favored recipient when distributions were intentional (partial).
- Younger children (4-6) inferred friendship even from impartial distributions, unlike older children (7-9).
Conclusions:
- Children utilize third-party resource distributions to make social predictions.
- Understanding the role of intentionality (partiality) in social inferences develops with age.
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