Children’s Prediction of Emotions in Cooperative Versus Competitive Resource Sharing Contexts

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

From early in ontogeny, children have descriptive expectations that resources will be allocated equally (Geraci & Surian, 2011; Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011) and expectations about others’ resource sharing become normative by around 3 years of age (e.g., Rakoczy et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2013). Here, an important question is whether they have any expectations about the beneficiary’s emotional state (who stands to benefit from someone’s resource sharing).
Theoretically, a stark contrast in which a potential recipient may expect sharing or no sharing is between a cooperative and a competitive context. Already 14-month-olds show a basic understanding of cooperation and are able to form expectations about the consequences of cooperative actions (Wang & Henderson, 2018). Thus, in a resource allocation context, a potential recipient may be happy (expecting to benefit from sharing) if another individual reaches the shared goal in a cooperative context. In a competitive context, in contrast, the potential recipient may be sad (expecting not to receive any resources) if another individual reaches her individual goal. Preschoolers readily attribute emotions to others in various contexts (e.g., Paulus & Moore, 2017; Pons et al., 2004). However, to date, there is no empirical investigation of children’s prediction of a potential recipient’s emotional state in resource sharing contexts contrasted as cooperative versus competitive.
Thus, we investigate younger and older preschoolers’ prediction of an individual’s emotion in a resource sharing context. We developed a target task with two open-ended picture stories. Here, different individuals play a game to obtain divisible resources in a cooperative or a competitive context. In the cooperative context, the individuals agree on playing together, whereas in the competitive context, they agree on playing individually against each other. In both contexts, children observe the “unlucky” individual (but potential recipient) not obtaining the resource herself but witnessing the other “lucky” individual acquiring them. A control task in which the lucky individual announces not to share anything (cooperative control) or to share with the other individual (competitive control) serves to rule out that children simple use inherent features of the target task in their attribution of emotions. At the end of each story, children are asked whether the potential recipient will be happy or sad (forced-choice format).
For the target task, we expect older, but not younger children, to be more likely to predict that the potential recipient will be happy in the cooperative context than in the competitive context. For the control task, however, we expect both younger and older children to be more likely to predict that the potential recipient will be sad in the cooperative context than in the competitive context.
Taken together, this work may open new avenues for investigating the ontogeny of normativity and may help bridge the literatures on early norm and emotion understanding.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, testing takes place online. The pilot phase is completed, and we are entering the test phase. Hence, we assume that our data collection (N = 80) and data analysis will be completed before the conference.

Authors

• Bianca Dietrich, University of Bremen
  Presenting Author

• Helena Petersen, University of Bremen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich
  Non-Presenting Author