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Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions
Adults frequently employ reputation-enhancing strategies when engaging in prosocial acts, behaving more generously when their actions are likely to be witnessed by others and even more so when the extent of their generosity is made public. This study examined the developmental origins of sensitivity...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2012
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485147/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23133582 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048292 |
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author | Leimgruber, Kristin L. Shaw, Alex Santos, Laurie R. Olson, Kristina R. |
author_facet | Leimgruber, Kristin L. Shaw, Alex Santos, Laurie R. Olson, Kristina R. |
author_sort | Leimgruber, Kristin L. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Adults frequently employ reputation-enhancing strategies when engaging in prosocial acts, behaving more generously when their actions are likely to be witnessed by others and even more so when the extent of their generosity is made public. This study examined the developmental origins of sensitivity to cues associated with reputationally motivated prosociality by presenting five-year-olds with the option to provide one or four stickers to a familiar peer recipient at no cost to themselves. We systematically manipulated the recipient’s knowledge of the actor’s choices in two different ways: (1) occluding the recipient’s view of both the actor and the allocation options and (2) presenting allocations in opaque containers whose contents were visible only to the actor. Children were consistently generous only when the recipient was fully aware of the donation options; in all cases in which the recipient was not aware of the donation options, children were strikingly ungenerous. These results demonstrate that five-year-olds exhibit “strategic prosociality,” behaving differentially generous as a function of the amount of information available to the recipient about their actions. These findings suggest that long before they develop a rich understanding of the social significance of reputation or are conscious of complex strategic reasoning, children behave more generously when the details of their prosocial actions are available to others. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3485147 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2012 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-34851472012-11-06 Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions Leimgruber, Kristin L. Shaw, Alex Santos, Laurie R. Olson, Kristina R. PLoS One Research Article Adults frequently employ reputation-enhancing strategies when engaging in prosocial acts, behaving more generously when their actions are likely to be witnessed by others and even more so when the extent of their generosity is made public. This study examined the developmental origins of sensitivity to cues associated with reputationally motivated prosociality by presenting five-year-olds with the option to provide one or four stickers to a familiar peer recipient at no cost to themselves. We systematically manipulated the recipient’s knowledge of the actor’s choices in two different ways: (1) occluding the recipient’s view of both the actor and the allocation options and (2) presenting allocations in opaque containers whose contents were visible only to the actor. Children were consistently generous only when the recipient was fully aware of the donation options; in all cases in which the recipient was not aware of the donation options, children were strikingly ungenerous. These results demonstrate that five-year-olds exhibit “strategic prosociality,” behaving differentially generous as a function of the amount of information available to the recipient about their actions. These findings suggest that long before they develop a rich understanding of the social significance of reputation or are conscious of complex strategic reasoning, children behave more generously when the details of their prosocial actions are available to others. Public Library of Science 2012-10-31 /pmc/articles/PMC3485147/ /pubmed/23133582 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048292 Text en © 2012 Leimgruber et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Leimgruber, Kristin L. Shaw, Alex Santos, Laurie R. Olson, Kristina R. Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions |
title | Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions |
title_full | Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions |
title_fullStr | Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions |
title_full_unstemmed | Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions |
title_short | Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions |
title_sort | young children are more generous when others are aware of their actions |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485147/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23133582 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048292 |
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