Attitude Towards Bribery in Early Childhood

• In Event: The Different Faces of Generous Giving: Children’s Understanding of Generalized, Strategic, and Corrupt Reciprocity

Abstract

Large-scale collaboration between genetically unrelated individuals has puzzled scientists from multiple disciplines (e.g., Henrich et al., 2006). One way in which these prosocial exchanges were made sustainable was by establishing social institutions (e.g., laws and social norms that constrain individuals’ behaviors; Fehr & Williams, 2013). However, institutions are often undermined by a self-advantageous aspect of human sociality: Corruption (Kaufmann, 2005). Acts like institutional bribery are widespread (De Graaf, 2007) and are associated with impactful events such as decreased economic growth (Treisman, 2007) and increased mortality (Ambraseys & Bilham, 2011). Despite this, the developmental timing of attitudes against bribery as a corrupt act is not well understood.

Even young children can showcase rather sophisticated understandings of norms related to conventionality (e.g., Rakoczy & Schmidt, 2013), fair treatment (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011; Warneken et al., 2011), and impartiality (Mills & Keil, 2005; Shaw & Olson, 2014). Yet rebuking the self-regarding and manipulative use of gifts seen in bribery can be tricky, for it likely requires discounting any apparent altruism. Specifically, bribery is a form of prospective reciprocity, in that it often entails giving gifts in exchange for favors; it is possible that younger children could find it particularly challenging to look beyond gift-giving to infer ulterior motives (e.g., Heyman et al., 2014).

To address these inquiries, we recruited 66 6- to 10-year-olds (Mean = 8;1; range = 6;3 – 10;11; 36 boys, 30 girls), and 53 adults in the U.S. from a university participant pool (majority-White, middle-income) and MTurk, respectively. All participants heard stories about four contests (cartwheel, story-telling, dancing, singing). On two trials, judges accepted a $10 gift card from a contestant before choosing winners, and on two trials, judges politely rejected the gift. Participants evaluated how good or bad (6-point scale) it was that judges acted that way (order counterbalanced within groups). Further, participants predicted which contestant (potential benefactor vs. neutral contestant) the judge would pick as the winner—an indicator of expectations about the potential for gifts to induce future reciprocity. As seen in Figure 1, like adults, older children gave harsher ratings to judges who accepted versus rejected gifts from contestants, and expected gift-accepting judges to reciprocate by picking benefactors as winners. Notably, younger children actually found it more acceptable for judges to take than reject gifts—even though they, too, anticipated that gift-accepting judges would become partial to gift-givers (for all comparisons, p< .05, via separate repeated-measures ordinal logistic regressions).

Taken together, these findings show a remarkable shift between 6 and 10 years of age in children’s stance on bribery: Whereas a majority of younger children endorsed accepting gifts, most of the older children rebuked gifts given as bribes. Further, as indicated by participants’ expectations of winner picks, during childhood detecting a potential for reciprocity may not be sufficient to reject bribery—weighing ulterior motives from seemingly prosocial acts might also be needed. In sum, the elementary school years mark a period in which people transition into judgments that run contrary to interpersonal and institutional corruption.

Authors

• Boli Reyes-Jaquez, University of New Hampshire
  Presenting Author

• Melissa A. Koenig, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Non-Presenting Author