Speaker: Yi ZHU, SWUFE
Host: Tong Zhang, Associate professor, RIEM
Time: 14:30-16:00, Jan.4, Sunday
Venue: H515, Liulin Campus
Abstract: Group-based competition is considered to be a ubiquitous social context in humansociety. However, little is known about its potential effects on children’s prosocialbehaviors. To this end, we designed an experiment in which two age groups (2.5-3.5years of age and 5.5-6.5 years of age) engaged in an intergroup competition taskwhere they did a so-called ‘game’ where each child transferred table tennis balls witha spoon from one container to the other. The non-intergroup competition conditionwas identical to the intergroup competition condition with one exception- nointergroup competition manipulation was involved. Then, they were required toperform two economic games used to measure their prosocial behaviors. We foundthat under the non-intergroup competition condition, as children aged, their behaviorstended to be more fairness-oriented (such as an increase in egalitarian behaviors).However, under the intergroup competition condition, children at 2.5-3.5 years of agetended to behave prosocially towards their ingroup members compared with thosewho are at 5.5-6.5 years of age. Such behavioral pattern under the intergroupcompetition condition reflected strengthening prosocial tendencies driven by theintergroup competition in younger children and simultaneously weakening intergroupcompetition-driven prosocial tendencies possibly due to the development of fairness39 oriented behaviors in older children. Taken together, these results point to theimportance of considering effects of competitive contexts on children’s behaviors andmay have important implications for further research on the role of competitive contexts in the development of human prosocial behaviors.
Keywords: prosocial behaviors, egalitarianism, parochial altruism,intergroupcompetition, cooperation, economic games, young children
