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Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes

To enhance their reputations, adults and even 5-year-old children behave more prosocially when being observed by others. However, it remains unknown whether children younger than five also manage their reputations. One established paradigm for assessing reputation management is the ‘watching eyes pa...

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Autores principales: Kelsey, Caroline, Grossmann, Tobias, Vaish, Amrisha
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5962684/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29867665
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00698
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author Kelsey, Caroline
Grossmann, Tobias
Vaish, Amrisha
author_facet Kelsey, Caroline
Grossmann, Tobias
Vaish, Amrisha
author_sort Kelsey, Caroline
collection PubMed
description To enhance their reputations, adults and even 5-year-old children behave more prosocially when being observed by others. However, it remains unknown whether children younger than five also manage their reputations. One established paradigm for assessing reputation management is the ‘watching eyes paradigm,’ in which adults have been found to be more prosocial in the presence of eyes versus control images. However, the robustness of this effect in adults has recently been called into question, and it has never been demonstrated in children. In Study 1, we used a method similar to that used in prior work: 3- and 5-year-old children took part in a prosocial task while in the presence of an image of eyes or flowers but without explicit mention or reference to the image. With this method, children did not show the watching eyes effect. In Study 2, 3-year-old children were tested with a modified watching eyes paradigm, wherein they first explicitly interacted either with images of eyes or with cloth flowers, and they then engaged in a prosocial task. With this modified watching eyes paradigm, 3-year-olds showed the predicted effect: They were more prosocial following exposure to eyes than flowers. These results offer potential insight into the mixed findings across the adult literature, such that the manner of exposure, and specifically how explicit the exposure is, may influence the watching eyes effect. Finally, no study to date has examined whether cues of human presence other than the eyes also influence prosociality. We found that children in the Mouth condition were prosocial at an intermediate level between the Eyes and Flowers conditions. Overall, the findings point to the remarkably early emergence of reputation management in human ontogeny.
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spelling pubmed-59626842018-06-04 Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes Kelsey, Caroline Grossmann, Tobias Vaish, Amrisha Front Psychol Psychology To enhance their reputations, adults and even 5-year-old children behave more prosocially when being observed by others. However, it remains unknown whether children younger than five also manage their reputations. One established paradigm for assessing reputation management is the ‘watching eyes paradigm,’ in which adults have been found to be more prosocial in the presence of eyes versus control images. However, the robustness of this effect in adults has recently been called into question, and it has never been demonstrated in children. In Study 1, we used a method similar to that used in prior work: 3- and 5-year-old children took part in a prosocial task while in the presence of an image of eyes or flowers but without explicit mention or reference to the image. With this method, children did not show the watching eyes effect. In Study 2, 3-year-old children were tested with a modified watching eyes paradigm, wherein they first explicitly interacted either with images of eyes or with cloth flowers, and they then engaged in a prosocial task. With this modified watching eyes paradigm, 3-year-olds showed the predicted effect: They were more prosocial following exposure to eyes than flowers. These results offer potential insight into the mixed findings across the adult literature, such that the manner of exposure, and specifically how explicit the exposure is, may influence the watching eyes effect. Finally, no study to date has examined whether cues of human presence other than the eyes also influence prosociality. We found that children in the Mouth condition were prosocial at an intermediate level between the Eyes and Flowers conditions. Overall, the findings point to the remarkably early emergence of reputation management in human ontogeny. Frontiers Media S.A. 2018-05-15 /pmc/articles/PMC5962684/ /pubmed/29867665 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00698 Text en Copyright © 2018 Kelsey, Grossmann and Vaish. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Kelsey, Caroline
Grossmann, Tobias
Vaish, Amrisha
Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes
title Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes
title_full Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes
title_fullStr Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes
title_full_unstemmed Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes
title_short Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous Following Exposure to Eyes
title_sort early reputation management: three-year-old children are more generous following exposure to eyes
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5962684/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29867665
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00698
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