Children Engage in Strategic Competitive Altruism with Peers

• In Event: The Different Faces of Generous Giving: Children’s Understanding of Generalized, Strategic, and Corrupt Reciprocity

Abstract

Humans, in comparison to other animals, are remarkable for their degree of cooperation and altruistic acts towards unrelated individuals. In addition to direct and indirect reciprocity, partner choice may also stabilize human-unique levels of altruism. As a consequence of partner choice, humans are not only altruistic, they are even competitively altruistic: they attempt to outcompete others in terms of their generosity in order to develop a prosocial reputation. A number of studies have provided evidence that adult humans cultivate their reputations as good cooperators, sometimes even competing with group mates, to appear most cooperative to individuals during the process of selecting partners (Barclay & Willer, 2007; Debove et al., 2015; Sylwester & Roberts, 2010).

However, nothing is known about the ontogenetic origins of such “competitive altruism”. In the current study, therefore, the aim was to investigate from what age onwards children invest in their reputation at a cost to themselves in order to outcompete another peer for being chosen as a future interaction partner for a mutualistic enterprise.

To address this question, 128 8-year-old children participated in a dyadic sharing game in which both children simultaneously decided how many rewards to share with each other. The goal of the game was to collect as many rewards as possible. Each dyad was assigned to one of four conditions which varied in two ways. First, either the children were observed by a peer (observer conditions), or the children played the game anonymously (anonymous conditions). Second, the dyad was either told that after finishing the initial game one of them will be picked by a third peer to play a more special and more rewarding second game (choice conditions), or they had no knowledge of this second game (no choice conditions) (Figure 1).

We found that 8-year-old children engaged in competitive altruism. Children this age were more prosocial (i.e. shared more rewards) when their actions were observed by a potential future partner. Importantly, children’s behavior is not explainable in terms of a simple observer effect as children shared more in the competitive altruism condition than in the audience condition in which they were only observed by a peer with unknown future interactions. Children from this age onwards thus do not merely track whether they are observed or not, but selectively invest in their reputation for being generous in order to be selected as a partner for a future interaction (Figure 2).

This is the first demonstration of competitive altruism in young children, and as such it underscores the important role of partner choice (and individual awareness of the process) in encouraging human cooperation from an early age.

Authors

• Esther Herrmann, University of Portsmouth
  Presenting Author

• Jan Engelmann, University of California - Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Tomasello, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author