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Xiao X, Zhang M, Li Y. The effect of competition on children's merit-based resource allocation: The difference between interpersonal and intergroup competition. BRITISH JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 2024; 42:49-71. [PMID: 37969058 DOI: 10.1111/bjdp.12467] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/05/2023] [Revised: 10/14/2023] [Accepted: 10/31/2023] [Indexed: 11/17/2023]
Abstract
Competition usually exists in groups in everyday interactions, but how children allocate according to competition outcomes (e.g., merit-based allocation) after intergroup competition and the difference in children's allocations of rewards between interpersonal and intergroup competition remain unclear. Children aged 3-8 years were asked to complete interpersonal or intergroup competitive games and were further asked to allocate rewards between themselves and their partners (Study 1) or between their group and the other group (Studies 2 and 3) and to reason about their decisions. We found that after interpersonal competition, children tended to conduct merit-based allocations when they won but were more inclined to conduct equal allocations when they lost; after intergroup competition, children were more inclined to make equal allocations regardless of whether they won or lost, only less than half of children followed meritorious principles. However, children conducted more merit-based allocations with age after both interpersonal and intergroup competitions. In addition, children showed less bias towards their own side after intergroup competition than after interpersonal competition. Finally, they demonstrated an earlier proclivity towards being influenced by winning outcomes than by losing outcomes after interpersonal competition, whereas a converse tendency was found after intergroup competition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xue Xiao
- Center for Teacher Education Research, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
| | - Miaomiao Zhang
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
| | - Yanfang Li
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
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Zhang X, Corbit J, Xiao X, Li Y. The influence of social status on children's merit-based resource allocation: The potential explanation of expectation. Child Dev 2023; 94:1281-1297. [PMID: 37068127 DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13930] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/21/2021] [Revised: 10/03/2022] [Accepted: 01/24/2023] [Indexed: 04/19/2023]
Abstract
How 3- to 11-year-old children integrate recipients' merit and social status when allocating resources was examined in 2021 and 2022. Study 1 (Han Chinese, n = 309, 150 girls) showed that while children prioritized merit, they developed from favoring high-status recipients to favoring low-status recipients. Study 2 (n = 194, 98 girls) and Study 3 (n = 138, 68 girls) revealed that children held stereotypes about the relation between merit and social status which shifted with age from expecting high-status peers to expecting low-status peers to work harder, these expectations corresponded allocation decisions. These findings suggest children shift from perpetuating to rectifying inequity and changing stereotypes about people of different social status may serve an important function in the process.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xuran Zhang
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China
| | - John Corbit
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
| | - Xue Xiao
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China
| | - Yanfang Li
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China
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Children's consideration of collaboration and merit when making sharing decisions in private. J Exp Child Psychol 2023; 228:105609. [PMID: 36587438 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105609] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/25/2022] [Revised: 12/02/2022] [Accepted: 12/05/2022] [Indexed: 12/31/2022]
Abstract
Young children share equally when they acquire resources through collaboration with a partner, yet it is unclear whether they do so because in such contexts resources are encountered as common and distributed in front of the recipient or because collaboration promotes a sense of work-based fairness. In the current studies, 5- and 8-year-old children from Germany (N = 193) acquired resources either by working individually alongside or by collaborating with a peer. After finding out that the partner's container was empty, they decided in private whether they wanted to donate some resources to the peer. When both partners had worked with equal efforts (Study 1), children shared more after collaboration than after individual work. When one partner had worked with much more effort than the other (Study 2), children shared more with a harder-working partner than with a less-working partner independently of whether they had collaborated or worked individually. Younger children were more generous than older children, in particular after collaboration. These findings support the view that collaboration promotes a genuine sense of fairness in young children, but they also indicate that merit-based notions of fairness in the context of work may develop independently of collaboration, at least by the beginning of middle childhood and in Western societies.
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Jacobs C, Flowers M, Aboody R, Maier M, Jara-Ettinger J. Not just what you did, but how: Children see distributors that count as more fair than distributors who don't. Cognition 2022; 225:105128. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105128] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/03/2021] [Revised: 04/08/2022] [Accepted: 04/11/2022] [Indexed: 11/03/2022]
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Ingroup favoritism overrides fairness when resources are limited. Sci Rep 2022; 12:4560. [PMID: 35296722 PMCID: PMC8927613 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-08460-1] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/09/2021] [Accepted: 02/21/2022] [Indexed: 11/08/2022] Open
Abstract
Ingroup favoritism and fairness are two potentially competing motives guiding intergroup behaviors in human. Here, we investigate if and how limited resources can modulate the way these two motives affect individuals’ decisions in intergroup situation. In the present study, participants (N = 58) were asked to accept or reject three types of resource allocation proposals generated by a computer: the ingroup advantageous condition, outgroup advantageous condition, and neutral condition. In general, participants were more willing to accept the proposals in the ingroup advantageous condition than the outgroup advantageous or the neutral conditions, and also in the moderate inequality than the extreme inequality condition. This may indicate that people sought a careful balance between ingroup favoritism and fairness, although we also found marked individual differences in their preferences for ingroup favoritism or fairness. Importantly, as predicted, participants were more likely to show ingroup favoritism only when limited resources affect the well-being of ingroup members. The present study provides novel insights into the situational and personality factors affecting human intergroup behaviors, shedding light on motives underlying intergroup conflicts prevalent in human societies.
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Engelmann JM, Zhang Z, Zeidler H, Dunham Y, Herrmann E. The influence of friendship and merit on children's resource allocation in three societies. J Exp Child Psychol 2021; 208:105149. [PMID: 33862530 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105149] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/30/2020] [Revised: 02/01/2021] [Accepted: 03/08/2021] [Indexed: 11/25/2022]
Abstract
Recent work has suggested that principles of fairness that seem like natural laws to the Western mind, such as sharing more of the spoils with those who contributed more, can in fact vary significantly across populations. To build a better understanding of the developmental roots of population differences with respect to fairness, we investigated whether 7-year-old children (N = 432) from three cultural backgrounds-Kenya, China, and Germany-consider friendship and merit in their distribution of resources and how they resolve conflicts between the two. We found that friendship had considerable and consistent influence as a cross-culturally recurrent motivation: children in all three cultures preferentially shared with a friend rather than with a neutral familiar peer. On the other hand, the role of merit in distribution seemed to differ cross-culturally: children in China and Germany, but not in Kenya, selectively distributed resources to individuals who worked more. When we pitted friendship against merit, there was an approximately even split in all three cultures between children who favored the undeserving friend and children who shared with the hard-working neutral individual. These results demonstrate commonalities and variability in fairness perceptions across distinct cultures and speak to the importance of cross-cultural research in understanding the development of the human mind.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jan M Engelmann
- Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA.
| | - Zhen Zhang
- CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
| | - Henriette Zeidler
- Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA; School of Life & Health Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4T 7ET, UK
| | - Yarrow Dunham
- Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
| | - Esther Herrmann
- Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA; Minerva Research Group on the Origins of Human Self-Regulation, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
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Corbit J, Lamirato K, McAuliffe K. Children in the United States and Peru Pay to Correct Gender-Based Inequality. Child Dev 2021; 92:1291-1308. [PMID: 33462821 DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13505] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
We explore the developmental origins of intervention against gender-based pay inequality in 4- to 9-year-old children in the United States (N = 123; Study 1) and Peru (N = 115; Study 2), two countries characterized by different norms surrounding gender pay equity. We presented children with scenarios that featured gender-based pay inequality, and they could intervene at a cost to redistribute the earnings. We examined whether children favor equality or show gender bias in intervention depending on the direction of gender pay inequality. Across both societies, both girls and boys intervened against gender inequality regardless of its direction, a tendency that grew stronger with age. These findings suggest that despite developing in societies with existing gender pay inequalities, children strongly privilege equality.
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An J, Yu J, Zhu L. The Origins of Intergroup Resource Inequality Influence Children's Decision to Perpetuate or Rectify Inequality. Front Psychol 2020; 11:571570. [PMID: 33329211 PMCID: PMC7728853 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.571570] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/11/2020] [Accepted: 10/29/2020] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Previous studies have explored children's intergroup resource allocation in the context of preexisting intergroup resource inequality. However, resource inequality between social groups often originates from different factors. This study explored the role of the origins of resource inequality on children's intergroup resource allocations. In experiment 1, when there was no explicit origin of the intergroup inequality, children of different ages mainly allocated resources in an equal way and 5- to 6-year-olds showed ingroup bias. In experiment 2, we examined the influence of different origins of intergroup inequality and found that 5- to 6-year-olds perpetuated intergroup inequality when resource inequality was based on either a structural (regional disparity) or an internal factor (difference in performance). However, 10- to 11-year-olds rectified inequality or allocated equally when intergroup inequality was based on regional disparity and perpetuated resource inequality when intergroup inequality was based on performance difference. The origins of inequality appear to play an important role in children's intergroup resource allocations, and older children can distinguish different origins of intergroup inequality in resource allocation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jing An
- CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.,Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
| | - Jing Yu
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, MD, United States
| | - Liqi Zhu
- CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.,Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
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Xiao X, Liu L, Wu Y, Liu L, Xu L, Li Y. Group bias in children’s rectification of inequality using resources of different values. SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 2020. [DOI: 10.1111/sode.12497] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Xue Xiao
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality Beijing Normal University Beijing P.R. China
| | - Lu Liu
- College of Marine Science and Biological Engineering Qingdao University of Science and Technology Qingdao P.R. China
| | - Yuting Wu
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality Beijing Normal University Beijing P.R. China
| | - Lisha Liu
- Center for Teacher Education Research Faculty of Education Beijing Normal University Beijing P.R. China
| | - Liangyuan Xu
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality Beijing Normal University Beijing P.R. China
| | - Yanfang Li
- Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality Beijing Normal University Beijing P.R. China
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