Children’s Prescriptive Ideas on Sharing Depending on the Source and the Type of the Resources

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

One reason people might decline sharing their resources with the less fortunate is that they think they deserve their extra resources (Bègue, Charmoillaux, Cochet, Cury, & De Suremain, 2008). This project aims to understand the conditions under which children think that an agent who has more resources deserves to keep them, focusing on variation in how the resources were originally acquired. We build on past work on the importance of merit versus windfall allocation on children’s sharing decisions (e.g., Kanngiesser & Warneken, 2012), extending the inquiry to include the effects of family wealth. This is important because inherited wealth is one of the largest real-world contributors to economic inequalities (Bowles & Gintis, 2002). We also ask whether people think money, which is an abstract currency, and other goods that are immediately valuable in their current form should be shared differently.
This study is preregistered, and we are currently collecting online data (current N = 27) from the families in lab databases. We plan to finish data collection (target N = 120) by December 2020. We have a mixed-model design where the source of the resource (i.e., windfall, merit, family resources) is the within, and the resource type (i.e., money or bouncy balls) is the between-subjects variable. In all conditions, participants see two children (Child “X” and “Y”) helping someone with a task. X receives 6 dollars/bouncy balls for helping while Y receives 2. In the windfall and family resource conditions, both kids work equally hard, while in the merit condition X works harder than Y. In the merit condition, X gets the bigger reward. In the family resources condition, children’s mothers’ reward their kid for helping, but X’s mom can give 6 dollars/balls while Y’s mom can give only 2. In the windfall condition, resource allocation is random. As the dependent measure, we ask participants how many (if any) of their dollars/balls X should give to Y. Overall, we expect to find a main effect of the source of the resource (i.e., compared to the family resources condition, participants will think that X should share more in the windfall and less in the merit condition), and the resource type (balls should be shared more than money). We also expect these effects to be stronger for adults and older children (8-9 year-olds) compared to younger children (5-6 year-olds).
We finished data collection from an adult sample. In line with our hypotheses, adults think the child who has more resources should give away .73 units of resources less in the merit (p < .000) and .40 units of resources more in the windfall condition (p < .01) compared to the family resources condition. There is also a marginal effect of resource type: adults think children should share .35 units of resources less when the resource is money instead of balls (p = .06) (see Figure 1). These results suggest that adults consider the nature of the resource and how it was acquired when deciding whether individuals deserve to keep their extra resources.

Authors

• Pinar Aldan, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author