Abstract
Social indirect reciprocity seems to be crucial in enabling large-scale cooperative networks among genetically unrelated individuals in humans. However, there are relatively few studies on social indirect reciprocity in children compared to adults. Investigating whether young children have a behavioral tendency toward social indirect reciprocity will help us understand how and when the fundamental ability to form cooperative relationships among adults is acquired. Using naturalistic observation at a nursery school, this study examined whether 5- to 6-year-olds show a behavioral tendency to engage in social indirect reciprocity in response to their peers’ prosocial behavior toward a third party. The results revealed that bystander children tended to display prosocial behavior toward their peers more frequently after observing these peers’ prosocial behavior toward third-party peers, compared with control situations; this suggests that 5- to 6-year-olds may have an essential behavioral tendency to establish social indirect reciprocity when interacting with peers in their daily lives. In addition, bystanders tended to display affiliative behavior after observing focal children’s prosocial behavior. In other words, observing peers’ prosocial behavior toward third-party peers evoked bystanders’ positive emotions toward the helpers. Considering both the present results and previous findings, we speculate that in preschoolers, such positive emotions might mediate the increase in the bystander’s prosocial behavior toward the helper. In addition, an intuitional emotional process plays an important role in the preschooler’s behavioral tendency toward social indirect reciprocity in natural interactions with peers.
Highlights
The tendency for genetically unrelated individuals to build large-scale cooperative networks in human societies is a major exception in the animal kingdom [1]
We investigated whether preschool children, in their natural interactions, have a tendency to behave prosocially or affiliatively toward a peer after they have directly observed the peer behaving prosocially toward a third party
The results showed that bystanders performed prosocial and affiliative behaviors toward focal children more frequently after the focal children’s prosocial behavior toward third parties, compared with control situations
Summary
The tendency for genetically unrelated individuals to build large-scale cooperative networks in human societies is a major exception in the animal kingdom [1]. We focus on social indirect reciprocity (SIR), which means that if A helps B, C will help A, who acted cooperatively toward B; this is based on individuals’ evaluations of others’ prior behaviors toward third parties [4,5,6]. Through computer simulations and analytic models, previous studies have demonstrated that SIR could evolve when individuals act according to particular strategies [2,6]. In all such strategies, individuals have the tendency (1) to reward helpful individuals and (2) to detect and avoid helping cheaters [2,6]
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