Abstract
Prosocial behaviour (i.e., voluntary behaviour intended to benefit another) seems to be fully developed in children by the age of 6 years. However, questions about which factors modify prosocial behaviour at that age remain understudied. Here we used a resource allocation paradigm to test prosocial behaviour in 6–9-year-old school children. They could decide between a “selfish” (i.e., one sticker for themselves) and a “prosocial” option (i.e., one sticker for themselves and one for the receiver) and we tested whether friendship, social status and prenatal androgen exposure (approximated by the 2nd to 4th digit ratio; 2D:4D) influenced children’s prosocial choices. We found that children behaved prosocially, and that their prosocial tendencies were negatively correlated with prenatal androgen exposure; i.e., children with high 2D:4D ratios (reflecting low prenatal androgen exposure) acted more prosocially than children with low 2D:4D ratios. Further, their social status in the classroom influenced their choices: children with fewer interaction partners chose the “prosocial” option more often than more ‘popular’ children. However, they did so irrespectively of whether they were paired with a recipient or not. Our results highlight the importance of considering social, as well as physiological factors when investigating prosocial behaviour in children.
Highlights
To help, cooperate, and share with others are central aspects of human societies, and they range from large-scale cooperation to small acts of charity
Our results show that 6–9-year-old children act prosocially when they are tested with familiar peers as social partners in a resource allocation paradigm that is not constrained by experimenter instructions, but by the physical properties of the apparatus
The prosocial tendencies of the children in our test were negatively correlated with approximated prenatal androgen exposure; i.e., children with high 2D:4D ratios acted more prosocially than children with low 2D:4D ratios
Summary
Cooperate, and share with others are central aspects of human societies, and they range from large-scale cooperation to small acts of charity. Two studies[21,22] tested children in resource allocation paradigms comparable to those used in non-human primates[15,23] They used an apparatus that had physical properties that allowed the donor to choose only one option per trial, thereby avoiding elaborate experimenter instructions. In the other study[22], where the donor could decide between delivering a high-quality reward or a low-quality reward to the recipient, 7-year-old children chose to deliver the high-quality reward to the other child only when they themselves received the high-quality reward In this respect, their behaviour was comparable with that of adult chimpanzees tested in the same study. It is possible that this set-up introduced attentional problems, because the children were so focused on their own payoff that they disregarded the reward distribution on the recipient’s side[21]
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