Poster #124 - Children’s Quality-based Resource Allocation in the First-party Context: the Role of In-group Favoritism

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Fairness is an important content of children's moral development. Equality, including numerical equality and quality equality (Sheskin et al., 2016), is one of the distributive justice principles. So far, most previous studies have focused on the number-based resource allocation (e.g., Blake & McAuliffe, 2011). However, children often allocate resources of different quality in daily life and previous studies found that resource quality played an important role in allocation (Chernyak & Sobel, 2016). Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the development of children’s quality-based resource allocation and the related factors. Moreover, according to the evidence from numerous researches about number-based resource allocation and social identity theory, children’s allocation can be shaped by in-group favoritism that children allocated more resources to in-group members (e.g., Jordan et al., 2014). Hence, whether the quality-based resource allocation will be influenced by in-group favoritism is worthy of attention. Given the above, this study focused on the role of in-group favoritism in children’s quality-based resource allocation as well as its age and gender differences, especially in the first-party context that involveds individual self-interest.
Participants were 61 children aged 5- to 6-year-old and 73 children aged 7- to 8-year-old. Firstly, they were asked to pick out two favorite objects (high-quality resources) and two objects enjoyed least (low-quality resources) from nine different objects. Then, we instructed the children to allocate any two of the four objects to himself/herself and the other two to either one out-group (strangers from other school) or in-group (good friends from the same class) member. Thus, two conditions including Out-group condition and In-group condition were generated. It was considered as quality equality only if each person received one high-quality resource and one low-quality resource.
As for the quality-based equal distributive behavior, the result showed that the average proportion did not change with age, χ2 = 1.65, df = 1, p > 0.05, furthermore, McNemar tests indicated that there was no significant difference between In-group condition and Out-group condition for the two age groups, ps > 0.05. However, as for the children who allocate unequally, the results indicated that 5- to 6-year-olds were more likely to show altruistic distributive behavior in the In-group condition compared with Out-group condition (p < 0.001), and showed more self-regarding distributive behavior in the Out-group condition than In-group condition (p = 0.011). In addition, 5- to 6-year-old girls (p = 0.008), rather than boys, were more likely to show altruistic distributive behavior in the In-group condition compared with Out-group condition.
In sum, quality-based equal distributive behavior did not increased with age in the first-party context, but 7- to 8-year-old children showed less in-group favoritism than 5- to 6-year-old children did. Moreover, 5- to 6-year-old girls were more likely to be influenced by in-group favoritism. This study provides implication that as for quality-based resource allocation, children from different age groups have different tradeoffs for multiple competing motives including equality, in-group favoritism and self-interest in the first-party context.

Authors

• Lu Liu, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Xiao Xue, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yanfang Li, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author