Welfare tradeoff psychology is active in childhood

• In Event: 1-035 - Friends and enemies: Children’s developing understanding of how relationships inform behavior, inferences and expectations.

Integrative Statement

Making decisions in a social context often requires weighing one's own wants against the needs and preferences of others. Adults are adept at incorporating multiple contextual features when deciding how to trade off their welfare against another. For example, they are more willing to forgo a resource to benefit friends over strangers (a feature of the individual) or when the opportunity cost of giving up the resource is low (a feature of the situation). Here, we explore the development of context-dependent welfare tradeoff psychology by testing whether 4- to-10-year-olds systematically forgo resources to benefit others in a manner similar to adults. We hypothesized that, like adults, children would (1) make repeated resource allocation decisions that were internally consistent with stable valuations of specific other people, and (2) be willing to forgo more resources to benefit friends over strangers over enemies. Further, in exploratory analyses, we asked whether children's expressed valuation of friends, strangers, and enemies were comparable in magnitude and variance to adults’ valuations. In Study 1, children (N = 208; 101 female; 4.36-10.93 years, M = 7.41 years) played three rounds of the “choosing game” on a touchscreen laptop. Children saw two cards on the screen: one card depicted a certain number of prizes for the participant, the other card showed a different number of prizes for another child (the participant’s friend, enemy, or a sex/ age matched stranger depending on the round). Participants selected which card they preferred by touching it. After each round of 12 choices, children spun a spinner which randomly determined which of the cards the child selected would be paid out in prizes. Only one of the child’s choices was paid out per round to disincentivize thinking of their choices as cumulative. As hypothesized, children’s choices were consistent with specific valuations for specific people. Also, as hypothesized, children expressed different valuations to different target types: children expressed higher valuations toward friends than strangers and higher valuations toward strangers than enemies (Figure 2). Furthermore, there were no effects of age on children’s expressed valuations—4-year-olds were willing to forgo just as many prizes to give friends prizes as were 10-year-olds. These findings suggest that the computations that underlie decisions requiring individuals to weigh their own welfare against others’ welfare emerge prior to children’s fourth birthday. In Study 2, we tested adults (N = 200; 92 female; range: 19–70 years, M = 36.28 years) using the same pictorial method. The pattern of results successfully replicated, but adults’ decisions were more consistent than children’s and they expressed more extreme valuations: relative to the children, they valued friends more and valued enemies less. We discuss possible explanations for the differences between the child and adult data including the role of deepening social relationships. We conclude that despite children’s limited experience allocating resources and navigating complex social networks, they reference a stable person-specific valuation when deciding whether to benefit themselves or another and that this rule is modulated by the child’s relationship with the target.

Authors

• Rhea Howard, Harvard
  Presenting Author

• Samuel Mehr, Harvard
  Non-Presenting Author

• Max Krasnow, Harvard
  Non-Presenting Author