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

Importance of Friendship and Minimal Group Membership in 4-6-Year-olds' and 9-12-Year-olds' Sharing Behavior in China

Strategies for favoring close others, such as friends and in-group members, benefit individuals and society. Although younger and older children apply these sharing strategies, how they integrate these relationships remain understudied. Friendship and group membership sometimes conflict (e.g. a friend from another, even a rival group), driving the question of how children behave in such situations. To address this question, this preregistered study recruited 121 4-6-year-olds and 94 9-12-year-olds from a middle-class community in China. A 2 (friend vs. stranger) by 2 (in vs. out-group) between-subjects design was applied per age group. Participants were asked to share seven objects with a recipient, who was either a stranger, or a previously nominated friend and from an in- or out-group (manipulated in the Minimal Group Paradigm). The results showed that children in both age groups shared more with friends than with strangers. However, only 4-6-year-olds shared more resources with in-group members than with out-group ones. Moreover, 4-6-year-olds did not distinguish between an out-group friend and an in-group stranger, while 9-12-year-olds shared more with an out-group friend relative to an ingroup stranger, indicating that friendship outweighs minimal group membership only among 9-12-year-olds. Furthermore, there was an interaction between age and minimal group membership, implying a decrease in the minimal group effect between 4-6-year-olds and 9-12-year-olds. Accordingly, the implications of friendship and minimal group effects, and their relative influence on sharing during childhood are discussed.

Focusing attention on others' negative emotions reduces the effect of social relationships on children's distributive behaviors

The present study investigates whether directing five- to six-year-old children's attention to hypothetical resource recipients that included familiar and non-familiar people would affect their favoritism toward a familiar person, as reflected in how they allocated resources. In Experiment 1, we instructed participants to give one of several stickers to another person or keep all the stickers for themselves. Under the control conditions, participants more frequently gave stickers to friends than to non-friends. However, when asked about others' emotions, they distributed stickers equally among friends and non-friends. Therefore, focusing on others' thoughts reduced participants' favoritism toward friends. Experiment 2 tested whether focusing on both emotional valences would affect favoritism toward a familiar person, as reflected in children's resource distribution choices. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except we asked participants about the other person's emotional valence. When asked about others' negative emotions, participants distributed the stickers equally between themselves and others. However, when asked about others' positive emotions, they distributed more stickers to friends than to non-friends. Neither others' emotional valence nor group status affected the perceived intensity of their emotion or the participant's emotional state. These results suggest that children's favoritism toward friends can be reduced by encouraging them to think about others' negative emotional states.

Helpers or halos: examining the evaluative mechanisms underlying selective prosociality

This research examines the proximate evaluative mechanisms underlying prosocial partner choice-based reciprocity. Across four studies we presented 855 university undergraduates (online for course credit) and 76 4- to 6-year-olds (offline at a university laboratory) with vignettes describing prosocial, social and non-social characters, and asked participants about their person preferences in prosocial, social and general contexts. Adults demonstrated sophisticated appraisals, coordinating between relevant trait and contextual cues to make selections. Adults were particularly attentive to prosocial cues in costly conditions, suggesting that they were using dispositional attributions to make their selections. By contrast, children were largely unable to integrate trait and contextual cues in determining their partner preferences, instead displaying valenced preferences for non-social cues, suggesting the use of affective tagging. Together, these studies demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying prosocial, partner choice-based reciprocity are not early emerging and stable but show considerable development over the lifespan.

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.

Is Distributional Justice Equivalent to Prosocial Sharing in Children's Cognition?

Distribution and sharing are social preference behaviors supported and shaped by selection pressures, which express individuals' concern for the welfare of others. Distributive behavior results in distributive justice, which is at the core of moral justice. Sharing is a feature of the prosocial realm. The connotations of distribution and sharing are different, so the principles, research paradigms, and social functions of the two are also different. Three potential causes of confusion between the two in the current research on distribution and sharing are discussed. First, they share common factors in terms of individual cognition, situation, and social factors. Second, although they are conceptually different, prosocial sharing and distribution fairness sensitivity are mutually predictive in individual infants. Similarly, neural differences in preschoolers' perception of distribution fairness predict their subsequent sharing generosity. Finally, similar activation regions are relevant to distribution and sharing situations that need behavioral control on a neural basis.

Normative views and resource distribution behavior in childhood: Dissociated at the group level, but associated at the individual level

Previous research debated whether and to which extent normative views and own resource distribution behavior in childhood are dissociated or aligned. The present study aims to advance this debate by examining the relation from two different methodological viewpoints within the same study. Here, 4–6-year-old children’s ( N = 91) normative views and distribution behavior when confronted with a rich friend and a poor non-friend were assessed. Children’s spontaneous protest and affirmation toward distributors, evaluations, and punishment judgments served as normative indicators. Looking at average normative views and behavior, preschoolers held a normative view toward rectifying inequalities while favoring the rich friend themselves. Looking at the consistency of interindividual differences, preschooler’s normative view correlated with behavior. The study highlights that the relation between normative views and behavior is characterized by both dissociation and coherence.