Young Children’s Donating Behavior Conforms with Generous - but not Egalitarian - Majorities

• In Event: 3-131 - Examining the Development of Conformity Across Diverse Social Contexts

Integrative Statement

The current study aimed to determine whether 4- to 8-year-old children (N = 251; M age = 78 months) would conform with a group majority displaying either generous or egalitarian donating behavior during a resource allocation task. The task employed was the prosocial choice test (PCT), a child friendly adaptation of economic decision-making games, frequently employed with young children. In the PCT children are placed into donor-receiver pairs, and the donor child is asked to make a fixed choice between allocating the receiver either a higher value reward (H) or a lower value reward (L). More specifically, the children in the current study were asked to donate using the ‘envy’ variant, a payoff that requires the donor (at no cost to themselves) to choose between an option that provides both themselves and their receiver an equal (egalitarian option) share of the resource (L:L), or an option that favors (generous option) the receiver (L:H). The children completed the task in one of two experimental ‘majority’ conditions (generous majority or egalitarian majority), or in a ‘no majority’ control condition. Participants in both ‘majority’ conditions viewed a short video showing four same aged peers donate resources to a receiver. Half of the children viewed a video of a generous group majority in which three of the four children selected the generous option (L:H), with the remaining children viewing the group majority (three from four children) select the egalitarian (L:L) option for their receiver. Upon completion of the video the children in the experimental conditions completed 6 trials in which they were asked to donate resources to an unfamiliar same aged receiver (represented by a photograph). The children in the control group donated to their receiver without viewing the donating behavior of other children. The results showed that viewing a generous majority had a significant influence on the participants’ donating behavior, with the number of higher value rewards selected by the donors in the generous majority condition being significantly greater than the number of higher value rewards selected by the donors in the control condition (see Fig. 1). In contrast, those donors who viewed an egalitarian majority donated at equivalent levels to the controls (see Fig.1). These findings suggest that prosocial majorities are particularly salient for young children, with majorities of this type stimulating children to conform with the modeled behavior, resulting in increased levels of prosocial donation towards even unfamiliar individuals. This tendency to selectively utilize positive majority information is likely an adaptive one that serves a useful function in promoting group co-operation, a fundamental tenet of successful human groups.

Authors

• Emily J.E. Messer, The University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Nicola McGuigan, University of the West of Scotland
  Non-Presenting Author