Abstract
Non-windfall approaches to sharing demonstrate pre-schoolers’ sensitivity to merit-based distributions of resources. However, such studies have not considered (1) whether epistemic aspects of task performance, such as the relative accuracy of a co-worker, influences pre-schoolers’ rates of sharing; and (2) how children’s emerging social understanding may impact resource allocations in high- and low-merit situations. These issues are of theoretical importance as they may provide new information about the scope of pre-schooler’s merit-based sharing behaviours. Moreover, as social understanding has been related to both increases and decreases in pre-schoolers’ levels of sharing, providing a merit-based assessment of this relationship would allow for a concurrent assessment of recent conflicting findings. In this study, three- and four-year-olds (N = 131) participated in an unexpected transfer task which was followed by a resource generation picture card naming task with a reliable or unreliable (high- or low-merit) co-worker (a hand puppet). The results showed that children engage in more generous rates of sharing with a high-merit co-worker. This suggests that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children and extends to epistemic aspects of task performance. However, such sharing was constrained by a self-serving bias. Finally, we were not able to detect an effect of children’s performance on the false belief task on sharing behaviours in the high- or low-merit trials, suggesting that these behaviours may not be modulated by social understanding during early childhood.
Highlights
Sharing behaviours form part of a wider suite of prosocial skills which include comforting, cooperation and helping [1]
We explored whether we could reject the hypothesis that the difference in sharing behaviour between children who passed and not passed the Theory of Mind (ToM) task was less extreme than an equivalence bound
One key difference between this and other studies assessing merit-based sharing with pre-schoolers rests on the move away from assessment of merit based on such attributes as hard work or effort [18,19], to an assessment of epistemic aspects of merit based on relative accuracy of the co-worker [15,16]
Summary
Sharing behaviours form part of a wider suite of prosocial skills which include comforting, cooperation and helping [1]. Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources studies are framed within potentially costly first-person contexts, yet consistently demonstrate pre-schoolers capacity to share with others. This is in contrast with ‘windfall’ approaches (where resources are freely acquired). These studies demonstrate pre-schoolers desire to keep more resources for themselves in costly first-person situations [2, 3, 4] despite understanding the norms of fairness [14] This suggests that non-windfall approaches offer an important route to help better understand prosocial behaviour at this key developmental period
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