Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes.

Amrisha Vaish,Tobias Grossmann,Caroline Kelsey

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00698

Abstract

To enhance their reputations, adults and even 5-year-old children behave more prosocially when being observed by others. However, it remains unknown whether children younger than five also manage their reputations. One established paradigm for assessing reputation management is the ‘watching eyes paradigm,’ in which adults have been found to be more prosocial in the presence of eyes versus control images. However, the robustness of this effect in adults has recently been called into question, and it has never been demonstrated in children. In Study 1, we used a method similar to that used in prior work: 3- and 5-year-old children took part in a prosocial task while in the presence of an image of eyes or flowers but without explicit mention or reference to the image. With this method, children did not show the watching eyes effect. In Study 2, 3-year-old children were tested with a modified watching eyes paradigm, wherein they first explicitly interacted either with images of eyes or with cloth flowers, and they then engaged in a prosocial task. With this modified watching eyes paradigm, 3-year-olds showed the predicted effect: They were more prosocial following exposure to eyes than flowers. These results offer potential insight into the mixed findings across the adult literature, such that the manner of exposure, and specifically how explicit the exposure is, may influence the watching eyes effect. Finally, no study to date has examined whether cues of human presence other than the eyes also influence prosociality. We found that children in the Mouth condition were prosocial at an intermediate level between the Eyes and Flowers conditions. Overall, the findings point to the remarkably early emergence of reputation management in human ontogeny.

Highlights

In the Eyes condition, 5-year-olds shared an average of 1.69 erasers (SD = 0.95) and 3-year-olds shared an average of 1.00 erasers (SD = 0.97), and in the Flowers condition, 5-year-olds shared an average of 1.63 erasers (SD = 0.62) and 3year-olds shared an average of 1.44 erasers (SD = 0.1.26)
The lack of difference in sharing across the Eyes and Flowers conditions is consistent with the two prior studies that tested for a watching eyes effect in children that did not find evidence of the effect (Fujii et al, 2015; Vogt et al, 2015). This lack of effect could be taken as evidence that preschool-aged children do not manage their reputations in the presence of minimal monitoring cues such as images of eyes, it is possible that children in Study 1 did not attend to the images because they were too engrossed in the prosocial task, which resulted in the images not having an effect on their prosocial behavior
We reasoned that young children might show the predicted watching eyes effect if the exposure were more explicit and interactive than in prior work, and if the exposure preceded the prosocial task so as to ensure that children can focus on one piece of information at a time

Summary

Introduction

We cooperate with family members and with perfect strangers, and even when we cannot expect direct reciprocity (Nowak and Sigmund, 1998; Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003; Gintis et al, 2003). Such cooperation is thought to be maintained in part by the reputational costs that individuals incur when they break cooperative norms (Wedekind and Milinski, 2000; Milinski et al, 2002). Recent research examining the motivations underlying such behaviors suggests that there are a wide variety of non-selfish reasons for children’s prosocial behaviors, ranging from concern for others’ plight to a desire to follow and enforce social and moral norms (Svetlova et al, 2010; Schmidt and Sommerville, 2011; Paulus, 2014; Eisenberg et al, 2016; Yucel and Vaish, 2018)

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Discussion

Conclusion