Children’s shyness and donation behavior toward an unfamiliar peer across repeated interactions

• In Event: Investigating Cognitive and Social Correlates of Temperament in Infancy and Childhood

Abstract

Although some previous work has proposed that shy children show difficulties generating prosocial behaviors (e.g., instrumental helping) due to performance anxiety, we know relatively little about sharing behavior in shy children that does not require self-presentation, and how this might change as a function of increasing peer familiarity. We hypothesized that shy children would show increases in donation behavior toward an unfamiliar peer across repeated social interactions due to their desire for social approval and a strategy to increase social affiliation, particularly if they felt socially rejected by the other peer (Ren et al., 2016).

Children (N = 192) aged 9-12 years old were matched with a same-age, same-sex, unfamiliar peer, and the dyad completed structured and unstructured tasks over Zoom across three sessions separated by approximately two weeks (T1, T2, T3). At the end of each session, children independently and anonymously participated in the dictator task to assess prosocial behavior (i.e., sharing of resources; Benenson et al., 2007). Children received 10 tickets for a gift card draw and could donate 0 to 10 tickets to their interaction partner. At T1, children completed a self-reported measure of shyness (Child Shyness Questionnaire; Crozier, 1995). Further, at the end of T1, children reported: 1) their desire to continue a friendship with the other child, and 2) how much they thought the other child wanted to continue a friendship with them (Wolf et al., 2021). Using these data, we computed a difference score to reflect perceived social rejection score such that higher values reflected greater perceived social rejection (i.e., the child wants to continue a friendship but thinks the other child does not want to continue a friendship with them).

Using a latent class growth curve analysis, we found evidence for three patterns of donation behavior across the sessions including: average sharers (44.4%), minimal sharers (45.5%), and increasing sharers (10.16%). These patterns are depicted in Figure 1. Further analyses revealed that higher shyness was related to membership in the increasing sharers class (p = .03). However, the child’s level of perceived social rejection moderated this relation (p = .01). Specifically, at high levels of perceived social rejection, shyness was predictive of membership in the increasing pattern of donation behavior across visits (p = .003), but not at low levels of perceived social rejection. This suggests that if the child wanted to be friends with the unfamiliar peer but perceived that their peer did not want to continue a friendship, shyness was related to a greater number of tickets donated to that peer.

We found individual differences in the patterns of donation behavior that children manifest to an initially unfamiliar peer across repeated interactions. We further found that children with higher levels of shyness who also feel socially rejected may be particularly likely to share resources with their peer across repeated interactions. We speculate that shy children who perceive a non-reciprocal friendship may engage in prosocial behavior as a social affiliative strategy to gain social acceptance from their peer.

Authors

• Kristie Poole, Brock University
  Presenting Author

• Linda Sosa-Hernandez, University of Waterloo

• Sarah D English, University of Waterloo

• Adrienne Richter Powell

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo