Poster #192 - Do children show in-group favoritism when soliciting help?

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Group membership influences children’s cooperative decision-making. In resource distribution tasks, younger children will share more resources with ingroup members than outgroup members (Renno & Shutts, 2015). These effects are observed even when group membership is marked by “minimal” groups (Dunham et al., 2011). In middle childhood, concerns for equality and fairness become increasingly important (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011; Shaw & Olson, 2012). This, in turn, influences their distributive decisions. Older children make more fair offers in economic games (McAuliffe & Dunham, 2017) and show reduced in-group bias when allocating resources (Misch & Dunham, 2018).

Fairness concerns may cause older children to manifest less ingroup bias when deciding whom to help. However, fairness concerns are less relevant to soliciting help, since soliciting ingroup members for help does not confer “unfair” advantages to the ingroup. Additionally, there are costs to asking for help; solicitations for help may be declined. Thus, children may be particularly motivated to solicit help from those deemed likely to provide it. Much research has examined ingroup bias in the context of providing help (Sierksma, 2018), but how group membership influences the solicitation of help remains an open question of particular relevance to children, who often need assistance from others.

In the current preregistered study (N = 144), we investigated how group membership influences children’s decisions to 1) provide and 2) solicit help. Based on their color preference, children were assigned to the blue or green team. Next, participants completed a test for ingroup preferences; consistent with ingroup bias, most participants (N = 110) favored ingroup members as playmates. In our between-subjects design, 4- to 9-year-olds saw 12 illustrated stories in which one in-group member and one out-group member could be asked to provide help (asking condition) or were in need of help (helping condition). All situations required instrumental helping. Half involved completing a task (e.g., washing a dog), and half involved distributing resources (e.g., giving a movie ticket). Children made forced-choice judgments between ingroup and outgroup members.

We expected to find a decline in in-group bias across development driven by older children providing help to in-group and out-group members indiscriminately. When soliciting help, however, we hypothesized that in-group favoritism would remain high across age groups.

Consistent with our predictions, overall in-group bias declined across development (r(142) = -.166, p < .05), still remaining above-chance for all age groups (t(143) = 8.24, p < .005). However, contrary to our predictions, there were no significant differences between the levels of ingroup bias exhibited in the asking (M = 8.15, SD = 2.95) and helping (M = 7.88, SD = 3) conditions; children were similarly likely to solicit help from, and provide help to, ingroup members, t(142) = -.72, p = .891 (Figure 1). All age groups, including the oldest children, showed this pattern.

Future studies using incentivized tasks and real-world social categories (e.g., gender) may address our research questions with greater ecological validity. Investigating children’s decisions regarding whom to ask for help is essential for a more complete understanding of cooperative behavior and its relation to group membership.

Authors

• Melisa Maya Kumar, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Richard E Ahl, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author