Poster #130 - Preschoolers expect prosocial actions from others who shared voluntarily (not involuntarily)

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

To navigate the complex social world and to detect cooperative partners, children need to go beyond evaluating outcomes of actions and pay attention to the underlying intentions of, and circumstances in which, individuals perform morally relevant actions (Killen et al., 2011). For instance, we might be uncertain about a person’s future prosocial behavior if that person was forced to share resources in a specific context. Prior research has found that children themselves tend to be more prosocial when they had voluntarily shared a resource at a personal cost with another individual than when they were instructed to share (e.g., Chernyak & Kushnir, 2013; Rapp et al., 2017). It is not known, however, to what extent choice and intentional prosocial behavior play a role in preschoolers’ third-party expectations about prosocial behavior. Here, we investigated preschoolers’ descriptive expectations about the causal agent of prosocial and selfish actions, based on agents’ prior history of voluntary (autonomous) versus involuntary (heteronomous) prosocial behavior.

Four, 5-, and 6-year-old children (N=69) observed two hand puppets sharing a sticker with a recipient (“sad” plush animal). One puppet shared voluntarily (voluntary prosocial agent) whereas the other puppet (involuntary prosocial agent) wanted to keep the sticker but was instructed to share by an authority. Subsequently children were shown outcomes of two resource allocations, each performed anonymously by one of the two hand puppets. On the prosocial trial, one of the two puppets shared 2 of 3 marbles with a recipient (“correct” answer: voluntary prosocial agent); on the selfish trial, one of the two puppets shared none of 3 marbles (“correct” answer: involuntary prosocial agent). On each trial, children were asked to decide (forced-choice) who – the voluntary or the involuntary prosocial agent – had performed the resource allocation. There was no effect of trial on children’s expectations about the causal agent of prosocial and selfish actions F(p>.05). We thus looked at whether children gave correct answers above chance across the two trials. While 4- and 5-year-olds responded at chance level (t(20)=0.72,p>.05; t(23)=0,p>.05), 6-year-olds expected the voluntary prosocial agent to be more likely to have performed the prosocial distribution of marbles than the involuntary prosocial agent, but the involuntary prosocial agent to be more likely to be the causal agent of the selfish distribution, t(23)=1.99,p<.05 (see Figure 1). In a forced-choice post-test, we found that both 5-year-olds (p<.01) and 6-year-olds (p<.01), but not 4-year-olds (p>.05), reliably identified the voluntary prosocial agent as the “good one” (see Figure 2).
Our findings suggest that by the age of 6, preschoolers use information about the circumstances and underlying intentions of agents’ prior prosocial actions to form descriptive, third-party expectations about their current morally relevant sharing behavior. They expected an agent who had shared resources voluntarily to be more likely to act prosocially (and less likely to act selfishly) than an agent who had shared resources involuntarily. Nevertheless, from around 5 years of age, children differentiate in moral terms between an agent who shares resources voluntarily and an agent who shares involuntarily.

Authors

• Julia Petra Friedrich, LMU Munich
  Presenting Author

• Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich; University of Bremen
  Non-Presenting Author