Assessing Young Children’s Economic Risk Preferences in the Presence and Absence of Peers - A Cross-Cultural Investigation

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Humans constantly need to make decisions involving uncertain prospects. To do so, they make use of various heuristics and biases that shape their risk preferences - some of which are rooted early in child development. For example, children take more risks as they grow older, and boys take more risks than girls. Further, the social setting in which risky decisions are made is of importance: Individuals are more likely to take risks when they are observed by their peers, as compared to being alone.
Given the early developmental onsets of such biases, scholars have mostly conceived them as fundamental to human decision making. That is, cultural context has thus far been ascribed minor importance in shaping the early development of risk preferences. Here, we test this assumption by studying young children from three culturally-diverse communities in their risk preferences across diverse social settings.
Children from a recent foraging community, the Hai||om of rural Namibia (n = 72, AgeRange = 6 – 10 years), and same-aged children from a recent agropastoral community (Ovambo, n = 72) were tested in a within-subjects design comprising three experimental conditions. In the individual condition, children lifted barriers arranged in a wooden apparatus to navigate two rewards down a ramp. After doing so, they could choose between a safe reward (1 candy in a transparent ball) or a risky alternative instead (2/0 candies in an opaque ball). In the observation condition, they engaged in the same task but were observed by a same-sex peer throughout the study. In an exploratory collaboration condition, children had to work jointly with their peers to obtain their rewards. Children engaged in four trials per condition and their choices of the risky options will be coded as a proxy for their risk preferences (see Fig. 1). Coding for these two cultural contexts is currently ongoing.
In addition to the Namibian participants, we plan to test n = 72 urban German children in January and February 2021. In case this will not be feasible due to potential restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we will report the results from the Namibian communities only.
We hypothesize that, across cultural contexts, boys will prefer risky options more often than girls. Further, we expect children to take more risks in the observation condition as compared to the individual condition, and hypothesize this effect being particularly pronounced among boys. Across communities, we expect children to show stronger risk preferences with increasing age. Further, we plan to exploratively test the effects of cultural context on children’s risk preferences given that previous research is largely inconclusive regarding risk preferences among foraging and farming communities. We will investigate the effects of the predictors (cultural context, social setting, sex, and age) and their two-way interactions on children’s risk preferences by running generalized linear mixed models with binomial error structure and comparing model fits via likelihood ratio tests.
Overall, the current study will offer significant insights into the developmental, social, and (potentially) cultural origins of risk preferences among humans.

Authors

• Roman Stengelin, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  Presenting Author

• Robert Hepach, University of Oxford
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel Haun, Max Planck Institute
  Non-Presenting Author