Do Children Interpret Costs as Signals of Commitment to a Group?

• In Event: Balancing Belonging, Fairness, and Cost in Children's Preferences and Predictions About Affiliative Behaviours

Abstract

Garnering a reputation as a reliable cooperator is crucial for living within groups, and so people are motivated to engage in costly actions in order to signal that they are highly committed groupmates (Gintis et al., 2001). Indeed, these costly signals of commitment are highly effective. Adults, for instance, are more trusting of both religious ingroup and outgroup members who engage in costly signaling (e.g., obeying strict religious dietary rules; Hall et al., 2015). Here, we investigated whether young children also expect a costly signaler to be a more committed, trustworthy group member. A recently proposed framework, the “naïve utility calculus,” posits that young children assume agents seek to maximize benefits and minimize costs, and further that young children use this basic premise to make a variety of inferences about agents (Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016). Basically, if a person engages in a costly action in pursuit of a goal, then children and adults alike will infer that the person must ascribe great utility to the goal. We extended this framework to the group context, hypothesizing that if children make this calculation when evaluating group members, then they should construe costly actions on behalf of the group as evidence of a person’s commitment to said group.
In an initial, preregistered study, we explored whether children not only view costly actions as signals of a person’s commitment to their group, but also whether this would affect their evaluations of that person. We introduced younger children (4- and 5-year-olds; n=51), older children (9- and 10-year-olds; n=53) and adults (n=69) to a novel social group (“the Zarpies”) and two people who are joining that group. To join, each person must donate one of their own toys to the group. Each person was shown donating a single toy to the group, but the number of toys each target had varied: One target donated their only toy to the group (costly actor), whereas the other target donated one of their four toys to the group (wealthy actor). Participants were then asked both first-person and third-person questions in a forced-choice manner (see Table 1).
We found that adults and older children both reported that the costly actor wanted to be in the group more than the wealthy actor, and that a fellow group member would trust—
but not necessarily like—the costly actor more than the wealthy actor. Additionally, adults and older children reported liking and trusting the costly actor more than the wealthy actor themselves. Younger participants, however, did not make the same inference that the costly actor wanted to be in the group more, nor did they have or expect a fellow groupmate to have a bias towards either target (see Figure 1).
While young children interpret costs as signals of a person’s desires (Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016), our results suggest it is only later in development that children view costly actions as signs of commitment to groups. In follow-up studies, we seek to rule out simpler explanations and form a clearer developmental picture.

Authors

• Emily Rachel Gonsier Gerdin, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author