The specificity of reciprocity: Young children reciprocate more generously to those who intentionally benefit them

Infants expect some degree of positive and negative reciprocity between strangers

Social scientists from different disciplines have long argued that direct reciprocity plays an important role in regulating social interactions between unrelated individuals. Here, we examine whether 15-month-old infants (N = 160) already expect direct positive and negative reciprocity between strangers. In violation-of-expectation experiments, infants watch successive interactions between two strangers we refer to as agent1 and agent2. After agent1 acts positively toward agent2, infants are surprised if agent2 acts negatively toward agent1 in a new context. Similarly, after agent1 acts negatively toward agent2, infants are surprised if agent2 acts positively toward agent1 in a new context. Both responses are eliminated when agent2's actions are not knowingly directed at agent1. Additional results indicate that infants view it as acceptable for agent2 either to respond in kind to agent1 or to not engage with agent1 further. By 15 months of age, infants thus already expect a modicum of reciprocity between strangers: Initial positive or negative actions are expected to set broad limits on reciprocal actions. This research adds weight to long-standing claims that direct reciprocity helps regulate interactions between unrelated individuals and, as such, is likely to depend on psychological systems that have evolved to support reciprocal reasoning and behavior.

Observing prosociality and talent: the emotional characteristics and behavioral outcomes of elevation and admiration in 6.5- to 8.5-year-old children

Helping and seeing others being helped elicits positive emotions in young children but little is known about the nature of these emotions, especially in middle childhood. Here we examined the specific emotional characteristics and behavioral outcomes of two closely related other-praising moral emotions: elevation and admiration. We exposed 182 6.5- to 8.5-year-old children living in New Zealand, to an elevation- and admiration-inducing video clip. Afterwards children's emotion experiences and prosocial behaviour was measured. Findings revealed higher levels of happiness, care, and warmth after seeing prosociality in others (elevation condition) and higher levels of upliftment after seeing talent in others (admiration condition). We found no differences in prosocial behavior between the elevation and admiration conditions. This is the first study to assess elevation in childhood and offers a novel paradigm to investigate the role of moral emotions as potential motivators underlying helping.

Experienced gratitude is a catalyst for upward spirals of perceived partner responsiveness

Considering the role of responsiveness in interpersonal processes has opened new frontiers for the science of gratitude. This article focuses on how responsive behavior feeds into experiences of gratitude, and how the emotion of gratitude provides fuel to catalyze perceptions of the grateful person's responsiveness, not only to the kind benefactor but also to incidental witnesses. We discuss the implications of a likely growth cycle of mutual responsiveness for dyads and groups. Then we turn to critical next steps for theory and application regarding gratitude, based on understanding of responsiveness in relationships.

Prospection and delay of gratification support the development of calculated reciprocity

Humans frequently benefit others strategically to elicit future cooperation. While such forms of calculated reciprocity are powerful in eliciting cooperative behaviors even among self-interested agents, they depend on advanced cognitive and behavioral capacities such as prospection (representing and planning for future events) and extended delay of gratification. In fact, it has been proposed that these constraints help explain why calculated reciprocity exists in humans and is rare or even absent in other animals. The current study investigated the cognitive foundation of calculated reciprocity by examining its ontogenetic emergence in relation to key aspects of children's cognitive development. Three-to-five-year-old children from the US (N = 72, mostly White, from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds) first completed a cognitive test battery assessing the cognitive capacities hypothesized to be foundational for calculated reciprocity. In a second session, children participated in a calculated reciprocity task in which they could decide how many resources to share with a partner who later had the opportunity to reciprocate (reciprocity condition) and with a partner who could not reciprocate (control condition). Results indicated a steep developmental emergence of calculated reciprocity between 3 and 5 years of age. Further analyses showed that measures of delay of gratification and prospection were important predictors of children's rate of calculated reciprocity, even when controlling for age and after including a measure of verbal ability. By contrast, theory of mind abilities were unrelated to children's reciprocal behavior. This is the first systematic investigation of essential cognitive capacities for calculated reciprocity. We discuss prospection and delay of gratification as two domain-general capacities that are utilized for calculated reciprocity and which could explain developmental as well as species-differences in cooperation.

Food sharing with friends and acquaintances: A study in preschool boys and girls

Introduction

The current study examined whether preschoolers in a (semi-)natural situation shared more food with friends or acquaintances, and whether this was different between boys and girls, older and younger children, and for preferred and non- preferred food. In order to do so, we replicated and extended the classical work of Birch and Billman in a Dutch sample.

Methods

Participants included 91 children aged between 3 to 6 years (52.7% boys, 93.4% Western European) from a middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood in the Netherlands.

Results

The results revealed that children shared more non-preferred than preferred food with others. Girls gave more non-preferred food to acquaintances than to friends, whereas boys gave more to friends than to acquaintances. No effect of relationship was found for preferred food. Older children shared more food than younger children. Compared to acquaintances, friends made more active attempts to get food. Moreover, children who were not shared with were just as likely to share food as children who were shared with.

Discussion

Overall, only a small degree of agreement with the original study was found: Some significant findings could not be replicated, and some unconfirmed hypotheses of the original study were supported. The results underscore both the need for replications and studying the effect of social-contextual factors in natural settings.

Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research

Helping behavior are actions aiming at assisting another individual in need or to relieve their distress. The occurrence of this behavior not only depends on automated physiological mechanisms, such as imitation or emotional contagion, that is, the individual's emotion and physiological state matching with others, but also needs motivation to sustain. From a comparative and developmental perspective, we discover that the motivation for helping behavior has a deep foundation both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. For example, empathic concern for others, relieving personal distress and the desire for social contact are universal motivations across rodents, non-human primates and human early childhoods. Therefore, a circle-layered model integrating evidences for motivation for helping behavior from rodent to human early childhood research is proposed: the inner circle contains the emotional-behavioral system and the outer circle contains the affective-cognitive system. The application of this model has significance for both behavioral neuroscience research and cultivating prosocial behavior in human society.

Cooperating elephants mitigate competition until the stakes get too high

Cooperation is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom as it aims to maximize benefits through joint action. Selection, however, may also favor competitive behaviors that could violate cooperation. How animals mitigate competition is hotly debated, with particular interest in primates and little attention paid thus far to nonprimates. Using a loose-string pulling apparatus, we explored cooperative and competitive behavior, as well as mitigation of the latter, in semi-wild Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). Our results showed that elephants first maintained a very high cooperation rate (average = 80.8% across 45 sessions). Elephants applied “block,” “fight back,” “leave,” “move side,” and “submission” as mitigation strategies and adjusted these strategies according to their affiliation and rank difference with competition initiators. They usually applied a “fight back” mitigation strategy as a sanction when competition initiators were low ranking or when they had a close affiliation, but were submissive if the initiators were high ranking or when they were not closely affiliated. However, when the food reward was limited, the costly competitive behaviors (“monopoly” and “fight”) increased significantly, leading to a rapid breakdown in cooperation. The instability of elephant cooperation as a result of benefit reduction mirrors that of human society, suggesting that similar fundamental principles may underlie the evolution of cooperation across species.

This study shows that in a task requiring coordinated pulling, elephants compete for access to food but work to mitigate competition in order to maintain cooperation. If the cost of competition becomes too high, however, cooperation breaks down entirely. This behavior mirrors that seen in humans and other great apes, suggesting that certain cooperative mechanisms are not unique to primates.

The development of prosocial behavior-from sympathy to strategy

Children act prosocially already in their first years of life. Research has shown that this early prosociality is mostly motivated by sympathy for others, but that, over the course of development, children's prosocial behaviors become more varied, more selective, and more motivationally and cognitively complex. Here, we review recent evidence showing that starting at around age 5, children become gradually capable of strategically using prosocial acts as instrumental means to achieve ulterior goals such as to improve their reputation, to be chosen as social partners, to elicit reciprocity, and to navigate interpersonal obligations. Children's sympathy-based prosociality is thus being extended and reshaped into a behavioral repertoire that enables individuals to pursue and balance altruistic, mutualistic, and selfish motives.

I'm not a little kid anymore! Reciprocal social influence in child-adult interaction

Human decisions are often influenced by others' opinions. This process is regulated by social norms: for instance, we tend to reciprocate the consideration received from others, independently of their reliability as information sources. Nonetheless, no study to date has investigated whether and how reciprocity modulates social influence in child-adult interaction. We tested 6-, 8- and 10-year-old children in a novel joint perceptual task. A child and an adult experimenter made perceptual estimates and then took turns in making a final decision, choosing between their own and partner's response. We manipulated the final choices of the adult partner, who in one condition chose often the child's estimates, whereas in another condition tended to confirm her own response. Results reveal that 10-year-old children reciprocated the consideration received from the partner, increasing their level of conformity to the adult's judgements when the partner had shown high consideration towards them. At the same time, 10-year-old children employed more elaborate decision criteria in choosing when trusting the adult partner compared to younger children and did not show egocentric biases in their final decisions. Our results shed light on the development of the cognitive and normative mechanisms modulating reciprocal social influence in child-adult interaction.

Reciprocity With Unequal Payoffs: Cooperative and Uncooperative Interactions Affect Disadvantageous Inequity Aversion

Cooperation among unrelated individuals can evolve through reciprocity. Reciprocal cooperation is the process in which lasting social interactions provide the opportunity to learn about others' behavior, and to further predict the outcome of future encounters. Lasting social interactions may also decrease aversion to unequal distribution of gains – when individuals accept inequity payoffs knowing about the possibility of future encounters. Thus, reciprocal cooperation and aversion to inequity can be complementary phenomena. The present study investigated the effects of cooperative and uncooperative interactions on participants' aversion to disadvantageous inequity. Participants played an experimental task in the presence of a confederate who acted as a second participant. In reality, the participant interacted with a computer programed to make cooperative and uncooperative choices. After interacting with a cooperative or uncooperative computer, participants chose between blue cards to produce larger gains to the computer and smaller for him/her or green cards to produce equal and smaller gains for both. Results confirmed our first hypothesis that uncooperative interactions would produce aversion to disadvantageous inequity. Lastly, half of the participants were informed that points received during the experiment could be later exchanged for money, and half were not. Results indicated that information about monetary outcomes did not affect aversion to inequity, contradicting our second hypothesis. We discuss these results in the light of theories of reciprocal cooperation, inequity aversion, and conformity.

Friendship is more than strategic reciprocity: Preschoolers' selective sharing with friends cannot be reduced to strategic concerns

The current study investigated whether children share especially much with their friends when sharing can be reciprocated (strategic sharing) or whether friendship and strategic reciprocity are independent factors in predicting children's sharing. If the former is the case, children should prefer their friend relatively more in a situation where the friend can reciprocate than in a situation without the possibility for reciprocity. In two experiments, 3- and 5-year-old participants (N = 270) could distribute stickers between themselves and three recipients: a friend, a child who would join the kindergarten group the next day, and a stranger. Half of the children were led to believe that their generosity could be reciprocated, and the other half were not. In Experiment 1, this was implemented by anonymous and nonanonymous sharing. In Experiment 2, the possibility of reciprocity or lack thereof was explicitly mentioned. The results show that participants across both age groups shared more resources with their friend than with less familiar recipients. Potential reciprocity affected 5-year-olds' sharing but not 3-year-olds' sharing-but only if reciprocity was explicitly mentioned (Experiment 2). Importantly, the preference for the friend was independent of the possibility to be reciprocated for all children. The current study shows that friendship and strategic reciprocity are relevant but probably largely independent factors for children's sharing. That is, the preference to share with friends cannot be reduced to strategic considerations.

Paying it back and forward: The impact of experiencing and observing others' sharing and stinginess on preschoolers' own sharing behavior and expectations

Recent research suggests that children's sharing behavior is affected by experiencing or observing others' sharing. These effects have been studied within research on the development of reciprocity and the effects of social modeling. In the current study, direct and indirect types of reciprocity and social modeling were assessed in 3- to 6-year-old children in three experiments (overall N = 382). In each experiment, we explored whether negative and positive social behavior were similarly paid back and forward in each of the different types of reciprocity. Moreover, we assessed the extent to which children reciprocated toward the protagonist who had performed the actual behavior and toward a neutral other. In Experiment 1, children experienced another's sharing behavior as recipients and could then allocate resources to this character and a neutral other. In Experiment 2, children observed another's sharing behavior and could then allocate resources to this character and a neutral other. In Experiment 3, children were asked to predict another protagonist's sharing in the same context as in Experiment 1. Overall, children treated the protagonist and the neutral other similarly and predicted others to do the same. Yet, they were more likely to reciprocate negative acts in indirect types of reciprocity. The results are interpreted with respect to the impact of observational learning and representational development on children's social behavior.

Comment: Developing and Maintaining High-Quality Relationships via Emotion

This comment addresses opportunities for understanding the social functions of emotion by taking a developmental perspective. I agree that understanding emotions and their development will meaningfully illuminate understanding of prosociality in everyday life. Taking Vaish and Hepach’s (2020) approach one step further, I suggest that rather than using the framing of questions about prosociality from the adult literature to guide questions about the development of social emotions in children, in the future, developmental researchers consider the social milieu in which emotions evolved and in which children’s emotions may develop, to guide their questions. This may feed forward to a richer understanding of cooperation and reciprocity in the literature regarding adult strangers.

Behavioral Intention Promotes Generalized Reciprocity: Evidence From the Dictator Game

Generalized reciprocity is the phenomenon that individuals treat others in the same way that others treated them in the past. Besides the behavioral outcomes, whether intention information also manipulates generalized reciprocal behavior remains unclear. By conducting two rounds of the dictator game, the current research investigated the influence from the dictator's intention on the receiver's following resource allocation performance. In the games, in order to allocate, either tokens in Experiment 1 or jobs in Experiment 2, a general tendency was shown to treat others better if one was generously treated than greedily treated. Regarding the intentionality, participants who received a generous offer (vs. greedy offer) from another person (i.e., intentional) would perform more generously to another person. However, if the offer was randomly given by a computer program (i.e., unintentional), the way in which one was being treated previously, became somewhat irrelevant to the participants' generalized reciprocal behaviors. Those findings verified the influence of the manipulation of intention on generalized reciprocity, and provided enlightenment for promoting friendly social interactions.

Do 5- and 6-Year-Old Children Attempt to Appear Fair to Others?

Children come to prefer fair distributions at the age of 5 to 6 years. But do they actually want to be fair, or do they want to appear fair to others? In three conditions, an experimenter initially distributed chocolates to 5-/6-year-old participants and partners they were paired with. Participants always possessed, through some means, two chocolates when the experimenter returned after a brief absence, and they had to decide whether to take an extra one for themselves. To measure the extent to which children were concerned with actually being fair versus appearing fair, two conditions were created in which children were led to believe that the experimenter did not know that the distributions had become equal. In the windfall condition, a confederate gave one additional chocolate to the participant, and in the partner condition, the partner transferred one chocolate to the participant. Compared to the control condition, participants who passed the false belief task in both of these conditions tried to appear fair in their distribution. Thus 5-/6-year-old children seem to prefer appearing fair to others regardless of the situation.

Paying it forward: The development and underlying mechanisms of upstream reciprocity

Two studies investigated the development and motivations underlying children's upstream reciprocity. In Study 1, 3- and 4-year-olds (n = 40 per age group) received or did not receive help while playing a game. Subsequently, children could share stickers with a new child. The 4-year-olds, but not the 3-year-olds, showed evidence of upstream reciprocity: Those who had received help were more generous toward the new child. Study 2 (N = 46) replicated the results with 4-year-olds and found evidence for a gratitude-like motivation underlying the upstream reciprocity: Children who received help evaluated the benefactor more positively, and positive evaluations of the benefactor correlated with children's upstream reciprocity. Thus, upstream reciprocity emerges by 4 years of age and may already be motivated by a gratitude-like mechanism.

The Development of Prosocial Emotions

Humans rely heavily on their prosocial relationships. We propose that the experience and display of prosocial emotions evolved to regulate such relationships through inhibiting individual selfishness in service of others. Two emotions in particular serve to meet two central requirements for upholding prosociality: gratitude motivates maintenance of ongoing prosocial interactions, and guilt motivates repair of ruptured prosocial interactions. We further propose, and review developmental evidence, that nascent forms of these two emotions serve their respective functions from early in ontogeny. The remarkably early emergence of these prosocial emotions allows even very young children to participate in and benefit from prosociality. We discuss the implications of and challenges to this conclusion and identify pressing future directions for this work.

Toddlers' intrinsic motivation to return help to their benefactor

A natural reaction to receiving help from someone is to help that person in return. In two studies, we investigated the developmental origins of children's motivation to return help. In Study 1, 18- and 24-month-old toddlers were either helped or not helped by an adult, and they could subsequently provide that adult with help or else observe another person providing help. We measured children's internal arousal, via changes in pupil dilation, both before and after help was provided. At both ages, children's internal arousal was higher when they could not help the adult who had previously helped them (and was lower when they could). On the other hand, if the adult needing help had not previously helped children, their internal arousal was equally low regardless of whether they or another person provided the help. Study 2 replicated this result and also found that if children had previously been helped but the person needing help was a different adult (not their benefactor), children's internal arousal was equally low regardless of whether they or another person provided the help. Together, these results suggest that young children are intrinsically motivated to return a received favor specifically to the previous benefactor, perhaps indicating a nascent sense of gratitude.

The influence of intention and outcome on young children's reciprocal sharing

This study investigated the influence of underlying intentions and outcomes of a partner's sharing behavior on young children's reciprocity. We provided 3- and 5-year-old children with the opportunity to share with a partner following different treatments of a partner's intention (to share or not to share) that led to different outcomes (children got or did not get stickers from their partner). For the 3-year-olds, we found that the outcome of the previous interaction influenced how much they shared, whereas the intention of their partner affected how readily they initiated sharing in response to social cues. For the 5-year-olds, we found that both outcome and intention affected how much they shared as well as how readily they initiated sharing. This suggests that already 3-year-olds are able to take into account outcome and intention information separately in reciprocal sharing. However, only 5-year-olds can combine both to flexibly maintain social interactions without running the risk of being exploited by others.

Intention Attribution and the Development of Moral Evaluation

Research with infants and toddlers suggests that even early in development, humans evaluate others by considering the outcome of an action in relation to the intention underlying it. When someone tries but fails to do a good deed, for example, it seems that it is "the thought that counts." However, research with slightly older children in the preschool years has produced mixed results: in some cases, children are solely considering the positive or negative outcome of an action when evaluating others, while in others, intention attributions are integrated. Such contradictory findings have prompted debate about the development of moral reasoning. Here, we examine extant research on early moral evaluation and propose that differences in the way that task procedures present intention and outcome information can (1) support or preclude young children's intention attribution and (2) alter the relative saliency or predominance of each kind of information. In turn, these differences would influence the frequency and degree to which young children generate intention-oriented moral evaluations.

Apologies repair children's trust: The mediating role of emotions

The current study examined whether emotions mediate the relationship between apologies and repaired trust following a transgression. Children (9- and 11-year-olds; N = 180) completed a two-round trust game where if they invested tokens in their counterpart, the tokens tripled in value and the counterpart would decide how many tokens to return. Based on participants' condition, either half of the tokens were returned, none of the tokens were returned, or none were returned followed by an apology. Children's investment in their counterpart in the second round of the trust game was a measure of trusting behavior. In addition, children completed an emotion evaluation measure of their feelings toward their counterpart. Results demonstrate that children who received an apology following a transgression were significantly more likely to demonstrate trusting behaviors and positive emotions compared with children who received no apology. In addition, both positive and negative emotions were found to mediate the effect of an apology on trust.

Reciprocity Among Preschoolers in Relation to Resource Allocation Toward Siblings, Friends, and Strangers

Children at age 6 years differentially treat kin, friends, and strangers in resource allocation games by being more altruistic toward kin. However, it is unknown how previous allocation experience as a recipient influences the potential kinship effect in subsequent resource allocations. The present study investigated how 4- to 6-year-old children allocated resources between themselves and a sibling, a friend, or a stranger in three allocation tasks after the recipient had previously shared or nonshared with the participant. Results showed that, when a share would induce cost on the self, 6-year-old children were likely to share with a sibling whether the sibling had previously shared or not, but they would share only with friends or strangers who had previously shared. When a share would induce no cost, participants across ages were likely to share with a recipient who had previously shared. When the decision option was between sharing equally and sharing altruistically, participants would allow the recipient to have more only when the recipient was a sibling or friend who had previously allocated altruistically. These findings suggest that kin altruism in resource allocation emerges at around 6 years of age and that reciprocity partly overrides and partly reinforces kin altruism.