Children Trust Prosocial Agents more than Antisocial Agents in an Economic Exchange

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Most cooperative interactions involve the expectation of mutual reciprocation, and are based on interpersonal trust. How and when humans acquire interpersonal trust, and which factors influence its development is crucial to understand complex social and economic relations (Birch et al., 2008; Clément et al., 2004; Gillis & Nilsen, 2013; Koenig et al., 2004; Koenig & Harris, 2005; MacDonald et al., 2013). Here we investigated whether prior social and moral information about trading partners modulates the choice of preschool-age children (4-5 years; N = 87) and school-age children (7-8 years; N = 69) to share their own goods in a child-friendly version of the Trust Game (Berg et al., 1995; Delgado et al., 2005; see also Rosati et al., 2019). In this game, children played with different puppet characters and received a candy during each interaction. Children had to choose whether to keep the candy (‘do not trust’) or give it to a trustee puppet in front of them (‘trust’) knowing that if they invest, the puppet receives three extra candies and it can decide to keep all the four candies or return two of them to the child, so that he/she would double the amount of the initial investment. In two studies, we addressed whether children’s trust was modulated by characters possessing either prosocial or antisocial traits (Study 1, ‘helpers vs. hinderers’; Hamlin & Wynn, 2011), or displaying either respect-based power or fear-based power (Study 2, ‘leaders vs. bullies’; Margoni et al., 2018). Preschoolers trusted leaders more than bullies (leaders and bullies were trusted by 67% and 31% of the preschoolers, respectively) and showed an emerging tendency to trust prosocial agents more than antisocial agents (69% vs. 47%, respectively). Results also showed that these tendencies were reliably stronger in school-age children than in preschoolers (94% and 45% of the school-age children trusted the leader and the bully, respectively, and 95% and 29% trusted the prosocial and the antisocial character, respectively). Overall, these findings suggest that preschool children understand complex cooperative exchanges and already rely on socio-moral representations of agents to decide which partner to invest in, although they do so to a lesser extent compared to older children. The current results extend prior work which has argued for early-emerging skeletal representations of moral goodness and badness, as well as initial understanding of social power and authority (Margoni et al., 2018; Ting et al., 2020; Van de Vondervoort & Hamlin, 2018), by showing that these representations can be activated also when children face the nontrivial task of deciding whom to trust.

Authors

• Francesco Margoni, Universitetet i Stavanger
  Presenting Author

• Elena Nava, University of Milano-Bicocca
  Non-Presenting Author

• Luca Surian, University of Trento
  Non-Presenting Author