Young dictators-Speaking about oneself decreases generosity in children from two cultural contexts

Sharing of resources is a common feature of human societies. Yet, there is substantial societal variation in children's generosity, and this variation emerges during middle childhood. Societal differences in self-construal orientation may be one factor influencing the ontogeny of generosity. Here, we examine anonymous Dictator Game sharing in 7-and-8-year-olds from two distinct societies: India and the UK (N = 180). We used self-construal manipulations to investigate whether priming self- or other-focused conversations would differentially influence children's generosity. There were no differences in generosity between populations. While a significant reduction in generosity was found following self-priming in both societies, other-priming was ineffectual. The findings are discussed in relation to experimental features and the role of anonymity and reputational concerns.

The proximate regulation of prosocial behaviour: towards a conceptual framework for comparative research

Humans and many other animal species act in ways that benefit others. Such prosocial behaviour has been studied extensively across a range of disciplines over the last decades, but findings to date have led to conflicting conclusions about prosociality across and even within species. Here, we present a conceptual framework to study the proximate regulation of prosocial behaviour in humans, non-human primates and potentially other animals. We build on psychological definitions of prosociality and spell out three key features that need to be in place for behaviour to count as prosocial: benefitting others, intentionality, and voluntariness. We then apply this framework to review observational and experimental studies on sharing behaviour and targeted helping in human children and non-human primates. We show that behaviours that are usually subsumed under the same terminology (e.g. helping) can differ substantially across and within species and that some of them do not fulfil our criteria for prosociality. Our framework allows for precise mapping of prosocial behaviours when retrospectively evaluating studies and offers guidelines for future comparative work.

Mealtime conversations between parents and their 2-year-old children in five cultural contexts

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime across five cultural settings (Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Germany, and Japan) and coded the amount of talk and gestures as well as their conversational embedding (interlocutors, function, and themes). We found a comparable pattern of communicative interactions across cultural settings, which were modified in ways that are consistent with local norms and values. These results suggest that children encounter similarly structured communicative environments across diverse cultural contexts and will inform theories of language learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Cheating and the effect of promises in Indian and German children

Cheating is harmful to others and society at large. Promises have been shown to increase honesty in children, but their effectiveness has not been compared between different cultural contexts. In a study (2019) with 7- to 12-year-olds (N = 406, 48% female, middle-class), voluntary promises reduced cheating in Indian, but not in German children. Children in both contexts cheated, but cheating rates were lower in Germany than in India. In both contexts, cheating decreased with age in the (no-promise) control condition and was unaffected by age in the promise condition. These findings suggest that there may exist a threshold beyond which cheating cannot be further reduced by promises. This opens new research avenues on how children navigate honesty and promise norms.

The missing link? How do non-human primates fit in the minimalist model of ownership?

Can Boyer's model of ownership psychology provide useful insights for comparative research? I apply his model to argue that we currently have evidence for possession psychology (based on competitive resource acquisition) in non-human primates, but not for ownership psychology.

Simulating peers: Can puppets simulate peer interactions in studies on children's socio-cognitive development?

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio-cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (AgeRange  = 3.5-4.5 years; N = 144; 76♀) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less mind properties to puppets than peers or adults. However, children's social cognition (i.e., normativity, prosociality, and theory of mind) varied little across partners. Puppetry relies on children's ability for pretense, but can provide valid insights into socio-cognitive development. Implications for using puppets as stand-ins for peers in developmental research are discussed.

With a little help from my friends? Acculturation and mental health in Arabic-speaking refugee youth living with their families

Introduction

Refugee youth are often faced with the compounding challenges of heightened exposure to traumatic events and acculturating to a new country during a developmental period when their sense of self is still forming. This study investigated whether refugee youth’s acculturation orientation (separation, integration, marginalization, and assimilation) is associated with depressive and posttraumatic stress symptoms and aimed to identify additional indicators of acculturation that may contribute to mental health.

Methods

A total of 101 Arabic-speaking refugee youths (aged 14–20 years), who were living with their families and attending school in Germany, took part in the study. They answered questions concerning traumatic exposure and posttraumatic stress symptoms, depressive symptoms, and several indicators of acculturation, including cultural orientation, positive and negative intra- and intergroup contact, language skills and friendship networks. All participants were categorized into one of four acculturation orientations using median splits.

Results

Kruskal–Wallis rank sum tests revealed that acculturation orientation was not significantly associated with depressive symptoms [χ2 (3, 97) = 0.519, p = 0.915] or posttraumatic stress symptoms [χ2 (3, 97) = 0.263, p = 0.967]. Regression analysis revealed that German language skills were significantly associated with lower scores of depressive symptoms (p = 0.016) and number of friends in Germany was significantly associated with lower scores of depressive (p = 0.006) and posttraumatic stress symptoms (p = 0.002), respectively.

Discussion

Policies that provide refugee youth with access to language classes and social activities with peers do not only enable them to actively participate in a new society but may also have a positive effect on their mental health.

Children over-imitate adults and peers more than puppets

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over-imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy-two German children (Age_Range  = 4.6-6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over-imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no-contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real-world social agents, such as children or adults. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We examined children's over-imitation from adult, child, and puppet models to validate puppetry as an approach to simulate non-hierarchical interactions. Children imitated adults and child models at slightly higher rates than puppets. This effect was present regardless of whether the irrelevant actions involved physical contact to the reward container or not. In our study children's social learning from puppets does not match their social learning from human models.

Pre-schoolers' images, intergroup attitudes, and liking of refugee peers in Germany

There is extensive research on children's intergroup attitudes, but their perceptions of refugee children have rarely been studied. We conducted a study with 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 60) in Germany following the arrival of unprecedented large numbers of refugees in 2015 and 2016. Children completed a set of three tasks that measured their perceptions of refugee children (minority group) and German children (majority group): a draw-a-typical-child task (including questions about whether participants wanted to interact with the depicted child), an intergroup attitude task, and a liking task. Results indicate that participants drew similar pictures of and had similar intentions to interact with refugee children and German children. There was mixed evidence for group favouritism: while participants showed similar explicit attitudes towards German and refugee peers, they indicated more liking of German peers. Moreover, children viewed refugee children as a less variable (more homogeneous) group than German children. Opportunities for intergroup contact with refugee peers (i.e., whether participants attended kindergartens with or without refugee children) had no discernible effect on any of the measures. Our findings provide a snapshot of children's perceptions of refugees in a unique historical context and contribute to research on the development of intergroup attitudes in real-world settings.

Promises on the go: A field study on keeping one's word

Promises are voluntary commitments to perform a future action and are often thought to be powerful levers for behavioral change. Here we studied the effectiveness of promises in two preregistered, incentivized field experiments with German students (N = 406) on the premises of a cafeteria. In Experiment 1, the majority of participants (63%) kept their promise to pay back at least half of a € 4-endowment, even though there was no foreseeable cost of breaking the promise, reputational or otherwise. Significantly fewer participants (22%) paid back money in a control group that faced a simple decision to return money or not. In Experiment 2, the majority of participants (54%) kept their promise to add a provided stamp to a postcard and mail it back (anonymously) within a week. We found similar return rates (52%) for a second group for which the word "promise" was omitted from the commitment. Our findings show that participants kept their word outside the laboratory while pursuing everyday activities even when there were no foreseeable negative consequences for breaking them, demonstrating that promises are effective levers for behavioral change.

The influence of collaboration and culture on the IKEA effect: Does cocreation alter perceptions of value in British and Indian children?

Creating objects can increase our evaluation of them, even when we compare them to physically identical copies (IKEA effect). Here we evaluate the influence of collaboration on the IKEA effect in two societies—the United Kingdom and India. One hundred twenty-eight 5-to-6-year-old children (48% female, 50% British middle class, 50% Indian middle class) assembled toys in pairs. Half of the children collaborated to assemble a single toy and half assembled their own toy. In both societies, children demonstrated an IKEA effect (η²_p = .19), valuing their own creation over an identical copy. This was the case regardless of whether children collaborated or worked independently. In summary, it seems that the IKEA effect is a potent bias that is present in diverse societies and is insensitive to others’ contributions in a collaborative environment.

The transmission game: Testing behavioral interventions in a pandemic-like simulation

During pandemics, effective nonpharmaceutical interventions encourage people to adjust their behavior in fast-changing environments in which exponential dynamics aggravate the conflict between the individual benefits of risk-taking and its social costs. Policy-makers need to know which interventions are most likely to promote socially advantageous behaviors. We designed a tool for initial evaluations of the effectiveness of large-scale interventions, the transmission game framework, which integrates simulations of outbreak dynamics into large-group experiments with monetary stakes. In two studies (n = 700), we found substantial differences in the effectiveness of five behavioral interventions. A simple injunctive-norms message proved most effective, followed by two interventions boosting participants' ability to anticipate the consequences of risky behavior. Interventions featuring descriptive norms or concurrent risk information failed to reduce risk-taking.

Challenges and Coping: Perspectives of Syrian and Iraqi Refugee Youth in Germany

Refugee youth constitute around a third of the refugee population in Germany. We studied the experiences of newly arrived Syrian and Iraqi refugee youth, aged 14 to 18 years ( N = 20), in Germany. We utilized semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis to investigate (a) the main challenges faced by youth and (b) their main coping resources to deal with these challenges. We grouped challenges into three levels: the individual level, the immediate social level, and the broader societal level. The most frequently mentioned challenges in our sample related to psychological wellbeing, school, friendship, accommodation, and discrimination. Youth reported relying on social support (friends, family, social services) and on themselves (through avoidance, persistence, activity seeking, active engagement) to cope with their challenges. Our findings provide insights into refugee youth’s experiences in Germany, encompassing the acculturative, developmental, and generational aspects of their lives and demonstrating their coping and resilience. We discuss our results in relation to the literature on refugee youth in high income countries.

Social norms and cultural diversity in the development of third-party punishment

Human cooperation is probably supported by our tendency to punish selfishness in others. Social norms play an important role in motivating third-party punishment (TPP), and also in explaining societal differences in prosocial behaviour. However, there has been little work directly linking social norms to the development of TPP across societies. In this study, we explored the impact of normative information on the development of TPP in 603 children aged 4-14, across six diverse societies. Children began to perform TPP during middle childhood, and the developmental trajectories of this behaviour were similar across societies. We also found that social norms began to influence the likelihood of performing TPP during middle childhood in some of these societies. Norms specifying the punishment of selfishness were generally more influential than norms specifying the punishment of prosocial behaviour. These findings support the view that TPP of selfishness is important in all societies, and its development is shaped by a shared psychology for responding to normative information. Yet, the results also highlight the important role that children's prior knowledge of local norms may play in explaining societal variation in the development of both TPP and prosociality.

Social information use in adolescents: The impact of adults, peers and household composition

Social learning strategies are key for making adaptive decisions, but their ontogeny remains poorly understood. We investigate how social information use depends on its source (adults vs. peer), and how it is shaped by household composition (extended vs. nuclear), a factor known to modulate social development. Using a simple estimation task, we show that social information strongly impacts the behaviour of adolescents aged 11 to 15 years (N = 256), especially when its source is an adult. However, social information use does not depend on household composition: the relative impact of adults and peers was similar in adolescents from both household types. Furthermore, adolescents were found to directly copy others' estimates surprisingly frequently. This study provides novel insights into adolescents' social information use and contributes to understanding the ontogeny of social learning strategies.

Children's respect for ownership across diverse societies

Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigated this principle in 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 152) from 4 diverse societies. Children participated in a resource task with a peer-partner, where we established ownership by assigning children to one side or the other of an apparatus and by marking resources with colors to help children keep track of them. When retrieving resources in the partner's presence, the majority of children took their own things and respected what belonged to their partner. A proportion of children in all societies also respected ownership in their partner's absence, although the strength of respect varied considerably across societies. We discuss implications for the development of ownership concepts and possible explanations for societal differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Most People Keep Their Word Rather Than Their Money

Promises are crucial for human cooperation because they allow people to enter into voluntary commitments about future behavior. Here we present a novel, fully incentivized paradigm to measure voluntary and costly promise-keeping in the absence of external sanctions. We found across three studies (N = 4,453) that the majority of participants (61%-98%) kept their promises to pay back a specified amount of a monetary endowment, and most justified their decisions by referring to obligations and norms. Varying promise elicitation methods (Study 1a) and manipulating stake sizes (Study 2a) had negligible effects. Simultaneously, when others estimated promise-keeping rates (using two different estimation methods), they systematically underestimated promise-keeping by up to 40% (Studies 1b and 2b). Additional robustness checks to reduce potential reputational concerns and possible demand effects revealed that the majority of people still kept their word (Study 3). Promises have a strong normative power and binding effect on behavior. Nevertheless, people appear to pessimistically underestimate the power of others' promises. This behavior-estimation gap may prevent efficient coordination and cooperation.

Children, but not great apes, respect ownership

Access to and control of resources is a major source of costly conflicts. Animals, under some conditions, respect what others control and use (i.e. possession). Humans not only respect possession of resources, they also respect ownership. Ownership can be viewed as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals inhibit their tendency to take others' property on the condition that those others will do the same. We investigated to what degree great apes follow this principle, as compared to human children. We conducted two experiments, in which dyads of individuals could access the same food resources. The main test of respect for ownership was whether individuals would refrain from taking their partner's resources even when the partner could not immediately access and control them. Captive apes (N = 14 dyads) failed to respect their partner's claim on food resources and frequently monopolized the resources when given the opportunity. Human children (N = 14 dyads), tested with a similar apparatus and procedure, respected their partner's claim and made spontaneous verbal references to ownership. Such respect for the property of others highlights the uniquely cooperative nature of human ownership arrangements.

Give and take: Ownership affects how 2- and 3-year-olds allocate resources

In three experiments, we investigated whether 2- and 3-year-olds (N = 240) consider ownership when taking resources for themselves and allocating resources to another agent. When selecting resources for themselves, children generally avoided taking resources that belonged to another agent and instead favored their own resources (Experiments 1 and 2). However, they did not avoid taking the agent's resources when the only other resources available were described as not belonging to the agent (Experiment 3). Children also selected fewer of the agent's resources when taking for themselves than when giving to the agent (Experiments 2 and 3). In giving to the agent, children were more likely to select the agent's resources than resources not belonging to the agent (Experiment 3). These findings show that ownership affects how 2- and 3-year-olds allocate resources. The findings also provide new evidence that 2-year-olds may respect others' ownership rights, at least to a limited degree, although we also consider an alternative explanation for the findings.

Considering self or others across two cultural contexts: How children's resource allocation is affected by self-construal manipulations

Most humans share to some degree. Yet, from middle childhood, sharing behavior varies substantially across societies. Here, for the first time, we explored the effect of self-construal manipulation on sharing decisions in 7- and 8-year-old children from two distinct societies: urban India and urban United Kingdom. Children participated in one of three conditions that focused attention on independence, interdependence, or a control. Sharing was then assessed across three resource allocation games. A focus on independence resulted in reduced generosity in both societies. However, an intriguing societal difference emerged following a focus on interdependence, where only Indian children from traditional extended families displayed greater generosity in one of the resource allocation games. Thus, a focus on independence can move children from diverse societies toward selfishness with relative ease, but a focus on interdependence is very limited in its effectiveness to promote generosity.

Children's Selective Trust in Promises

There has been extensive research into the development of selective trust in testimony, but little is known about the development of selective trust in promises. The present research investigates children's (N = 264) selective trust in others' promises to help. In Study 1, 6-year-olds selectively trusted speakers who had previously kept a promise. In Study 2, 5-year-olds displayed selective trust for speakers who had previously kept a prosocial promise (promise to help). In Study 3, 5-year-olds trusted a speaker, who kept a prosocial promise, over a helper. These data suggest that from the age of 5 children show selective trust in others' promises using prosociality, promise keeping, or both to inform their judgments.

When and how does labour lead to love? The ontogeny and mechanisms of the IKEA effect

We elevate our constructions to a special status in our minds. This 'IKEA' effect leads us to believe that our creations are more valuable than items that are identical, but constructed by another. This series of studies utilises a developmental perspective to explore why this bias exists. Study 1 elucidates the ontogeny of the IKEA effect, demonstrating an emerging bias at age 5, corresponding with key developmental milestones in self-concept formation. Study 2 assesses the role of effort, revealing that the IKEA effect is not moderated by the amount of effort invested in the task in 5-to-6-year olds. Finally, Study 3 examines whether feelings of ownership moderate the IKEA effect, finding that ownership alone cannot explain why children value their creations more. Altogether, results from this study series are incompatible with existing theories of the IKEA bias. Instead, we propose a new framework to examine biases in decision making. Perhaps the IKEA effect reflects a link between our creations and our self-concept, emerging at age 5, leading us to value them more positively than others' creations.

The limits of endowment effects in great apes (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, Pongo pygmaeus)

The endowment effect describes the bias that people often value things that they possess more than things they do not possess. Thus, they are often reluctant to trade items in their possession for items of equivalent value. Some nonhuman primates appear to share this bias with humans, but it remains an open question whether they show endowment effects to the same extent as humans do. We investigated endowment effects in all four great ape species (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, Pongo pygmaeus) by varying whether apes were endowed with food items (Experiment 1, N = 22) or tools that were instrumental in retrieving food (Experiment 2, N = 23). We first assessed apes' preferences for items of a pair and their willingness to trade items in their possession. We then endowed apes with one item of a pair and offered them to trade for the other item. Apes showed endowment effects for food, but not for tools. In Experiment 3, we endowed bonobos (N = 4) and orangutans (N = 5) with either one or 12 food items. Endowment effects did not differ between species and were not influenced by the number of endowed food items. Our findings suggest that endowment effects in great apes are restricted to immediate food gratification and remain unaffected by the quantity of food rewards. However, endowment effects do not seem to extend to other, nonconsumable possessions even when they are instrumental in retrieving food. In general, apes do not show endowment effects across a range of different commodities as humans typically do.

Grooming network cohesion and the role of individuals in a captive chimpanzee group

Social network analysis offers new tools to study the social structure of primate groups. We used social network analysis to investigate the cohesiveness of a grooming network in a captive chimpanzee group (N = 17) and the role that individuals may play in it. Using data from a year-long observation, we constructed an unweighted social network of preferred grooming interactions by retaining only those dyads that groomed above the group mean. This choice of criterion was validated by the finding that the properties of the unweighted network correlated with the properties of a weighted network (i.e. a network representing the frequency of grooming interactions) constructed from the same data. To investigate group cohesion, we tested the resilience of the unweighted grooming network to the removal of central individuals (i.e. individuals with high betweenness centrality). The network fragmented more after the removal of individuals with high betweenness centrality than after the removal of random individuals. Central individuals played a pivotal role in maintaining the network's cohesiveness, and we suggest that this may be a typical property of affiliative networks like grooming networks. We found that the grooming network correlated with kinship and age, and that individuals with higher social status occupied more central positions in the network. Overall, the grooming network showed a heterogeneous structure, yet did not exhibit scale-free properties similar to many other primate networks. We discuss our results in light of recent findings on animal social networks and chimpanzee grooming.

The Effect of Creative Labor on Property-Ownership Transfer by Preschool Children and Adults

Recognizing property ownership is of critical importance in social interactions, but little is known about how and when this attribute emerges. We investigated whether preschool children and adults believe that ownership of one person’s property is transferred to a second person following the second person’s investment of creative labor in that property. In our study, an experimenter and a participant borrowed modeling-clay objects from each other to mold into new objects. Participants were more likely to transfer ownership to the second individual after he or she invested creative labor in the object than after any other manipulations (holding the object, making small changes to it). This effect was significantly stronger in preschool children than in adults. Duration of manipulation had no effect on property-ownership transfer. Changes in the object’s identity acted only as a secondary cue for children. We conclude that ownership is transferred after an investment of creative labor and that determining property ownership may be an intuitive process that emerges in early childhood.

Bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orang utans use feature and spatial cues in two spatial memory tasks

Animals commonly use feature and spatial strategies when remembering places of interest such as food sources or hiding places. We conducted three experiments with great apes to investigate strategy preferences and factors that may shape them. In the first experiment, we trained 17 apes to remember 12 different food locations on the floor of their sleeping room. The 12 food locations were associated with one feature cue, so that feature and spatial cues were confounded. In a single test session, we brought the cues into conflict and found that apes, irrespective of species, showed a preference for a feature strategy. In the second experiment, we used a similar procedure and trained 25 apes to remember one food location on a platform in front of them. On average, apes preferred to use a feature strategy but some individuals relied on a spatial strategy. In the final experiment, we investigated whether training might influence strategy preferences. We tested 21 apes in the platform set-up and found that apes used both, feature and spatial strategies irrespective of training. We conclude that apes can use feature and spatial strategies to remember the location of hidden food items, but that task demands (e.g. different numbers of search locations) can influence strategy preferences. We found no evidence, however, for the role of training in shaping these preferences.