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The Impact of Self-Relevance on Preschool Children's Sharing

Wenjie Zhang1,2, Songmei Xiang3, Hongmei Dai4

  • 1Department of Psychology, School of Education Science, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China.

Frontiers in Psychology
|June 14, 2019
PubMed

Insights

Preschool children

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Behavioral Economics

Background:

  • Understanding children's prosocial behavior is crucial for developmental psychology.
  • Preschoolers' decision-making in resource allocation is influenced by social factors.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how self-relevance impacts preschool children's sharing behavior.
  • To examine sharing in both first-party and third-party dictator game scenarios.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a forced-choice resource distribution paradigm with preschool children (N=137).
  • Assessed sharing behavior with recipients of varying self-relevance (friends, acquaintances, strangers).
  • Employed different payoff structures (non-costly, costly, envy, non-bias, high self-bias, low self-bias).

Main Results:

  • Children shared more with highly self-relevant recipients (friends) than less relevant ones.
  • Selective generosity was observed in both first-party and third-party situations.
  • The effect of self-relevance on sharing was more pronounced in older preschool children.

Conclusions:

  • Self-relevance significantly influences preschool children's sharing decisions.
  • Children exhibit preferential sharing based on their relationship with the recipient.
  • Findings highlight the early development of social decision-making and fairness.

Keywords:
dictator gamepreschool childrenrecipientresource sharingself-relevance

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