Friend or Fair: The development of loyalty and impartiality in the US and China

• In Event: 1-035 - Friends and enemies: Children’s developing understanding of how relationships inform behavior, inferences and expectations.

Integrative Statement

Conflicts often arise and people must decide if they want to be impartial or take sides based on personal loyalties (Waytz, Dungan, & Young, 2013). Highlighting this tension, recent work in adults has demonstrated that our friends, but not acquaintances, often expect us to take their sides and respond negatively to impartial neutrality (Shaw et al., 2017). The current work explores when children think that friends will respond negatively to neutrality and what they think one ought to do when they are asked to take sides. In line with past work on loyalty (Furman & Beirman, 1983) and fairness (Shaw, 2013), we predicted that children would understand the importance of both loyalty and fairness more as they matured and that these two capacities might develop in tandem.
In three studies, we presented 4- to 11-year-old children with scenarios about three children, two of whom were friends and the third who was a acquantnace classmate to the other two. In the scenarios, one of the friends (the decider) is asked to take sides about which of the two children should get: a kite (Study 1), to play the lion in a play (Study 2), and to be leader (Study 3). The decider opts not to take sides in each scenario. Participants were asked which of the children, the side-taker’s friend or the classmate, will be more upset at the decider and what the decider should have done in this situation. We conducted these studies in both the United States (N = 286) and China (N = 438) to see if the results would generalize across cultures. We found no consistent differences across countries and so we collapse below, all p’s > .42 (the results and age progression were strikingly similar across these two very different cultures).
First, when examining who children thought would be more upset, we found a clear effect of age such that children get older they increasingly think that the friend will be more upset at the decider for refusing to take sides as (p < .001). Indeed, younger children (4- to 5-year-olds) thought that the friend would be upset at below chance levels (36%) whereas older children (9- to 11-year-olds) believed that the friend would be more upset at above chance levels (69%, p < .001).
Second, when looking at who children thought the person should show preferential treatment towards, we found a clear effect of age such that participants increasingly think that the side-taker should treat the two children equally as they get older (p < .001). Younger children believed that the decider should favor their friend (79%, p < .001) whereas older children did not show a preference (58%) and in follow-up work many thought the decider should give it to no one, which was not true in younger children (Study 3).
These results suggest that as children mature they increasingly appreciate the importance of loyalty (knowing that a friend will be upset at neutrality) and also that impartiality is the “right thing to do:”

Authors

• Alex Shaw, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Yinyuan Zheng, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anam Barakzai, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author