Poster #129 - Police officers and cheerleaders: The effect of moral emotion on children’s strong reciprocity

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Strong reciprocity, the strategy to either compensate cooperators or punish violators at own cost, is developed through cultural group selection during evolution and works best in large, market driven societies to stabilize cooperative behavior at the group level. The emergence of strong reciprocity at the individual level has immense implication for children’s prosocial development and civic education. It is proposed that children as third party strong reciprocators are not simply peacemakers to even out inequality, they are rather police officers who punish defectors or cheerleaders who reward cooperators, even at their own cost. Specifically, children would demonstrate moral emotional arousal toward the defectors and cooperators in face of unfair or unjust sharing, which would inturn predict their decision to intervene.
In total, 134 4- to 7-year-old children (mean age = 68.55 months, SD = 12.17, 70 girls) participated in a within-subject 2 (equal vs. unequal) X 2 (punishment vs. compensation) X 2 (cost vs. no-cost) third-party multiple-trial sharing game. Participants observed two puppets, one fair player and one unfair player, sharing stickers with each other for several rounds. In the unequal condition, the unfair player accumulated more stickers than the fair players at the end of the sharing; whereas in the equal condition, the fair player “surprisingly” found extra stickers stuck at the back of others therefore the two players ended up with equal amount of stickers. The participants were asked to report their moral emotions, i.e., anger and empathy, towards the two players, and whether they would like to intervene with the result. In counterbalanced order, children could ask the experimenter to give stickers to the fair player or take away stickers from the unfair player, either with or without scarifying their own tokens.
Children as young as 4-year-old reported empathy towards the fair player and anger towards the unfair player, regardless the results were equal or unequal (Figure 1). While older children tended to intervene in unequal condition, younger children did not differentiate equal from unequal sharing in their decision to intervene. Children were more likely to intervene when the decision did not cost them anything; and they were more likely to compensate than to punish. With age, children gave up less of their own tokens to punish or compensate the players. Hierarchical regression (Table 1) suggested that in addition to age and gender, both anger and the experimental conditions (cost/no-cost, punish/compensate, and equal/unequal) contributed to how many stickers children decided to give to the fair player or take away from the unfair player, with cost being the most salient predictor.
The findings suggested that young children not only responded to the unfair result (distributive justice), but also to the unjust sharing (procedural justice) with moral emotions. However, they were more willing to be cheerleaders than police officers, and more likely to intervene when the decision did not cost them anything. Further research should focus on the factors affecting children’s prosocial punishment/compensation when it is costly to them.

Authors

• Zhenlin Wang, The Education University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author

• Rong Kang, The Education University of Hong Kong
  Non-Presenting Author