The Influence of Receiver’s Wealth and Power Status on School-age Children’s Compensation Behavior

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

People care deeply about justice when allocating. The perception that others are treated in an unfair way will motive people to exert effort to repair the inequity by compensating victims (Van Prooijen, 2013). Plenty researchers found that children around 8 year-old have been able to compensate character who has less initial resource by allocating more to them (e.g. Rizzo & Killen, 2016). Moreover, inequity in social society is complicated and various, which is not only caused by material but also relational asymmetry (Charafeddine, 2016). However, scarce studies focused the effect of different kinds of inequality on children’s compensation behavior and its relative importance. In present study, we designed two experiments to examine how children allocate collective resource in wealth and power status situations and how they weigh the two factors.
Participants in Experiment 1 were thirty 7-8-year-old Chinese children (40.0% girls). Children were firstly showed a pair of characters, one of them is wealthy (whose family lives in exclusive apartment and who owns many novel toys) and the other is poor (whose family lives in normal house and who only owns a few toys). They were asked to allocate three stickers between the two characters. Then they were showed another pair of character, one is dominate (who can always decide what to play) and the other is subordinate (who always obey the dominate character when discussing what to play), and then they were also asked to allocate three stickers between the two characters. The pair-sampled t test for the amount children allocate to high- and low-status character showed that, participants allocated significantly more stickers to low-status character than high-status one in both wealth (t = -5.27, p < .001) and power status conditions (t = -5.41, p < .001).
In Experiment 2, we set up a conflict situation where receivers’ wealth and power status are both exist, one of the two characters is wealthy and subordinate (W-S), while the other one is poor but dominate (P-D), children also allocated three stickers between the two characters. The pair-sampled t test showed that children allocate more to W-S than P-D character (t=2.57, p=.02). It suggested that 7-8-year-old children would choose to compensate receivers’ low-power status preferentially than their low-wealth status.
These results suggested that 7-8-year-old children have developed ability to compensate disadvantaged characters in both wealth and power inequity context, however, children did not value the two kinds of inequity as same important, because they tend to weigh characters power status more important when allocating. It revealed that school age children’ compensation behavior is selective in a moral dilemma, under Chinese culture background, asymmetry in relationship would have a stronger affection on children’s allocation.

Authors

• Xuran Zhang, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Xiao Xue
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yanfang Li, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author