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Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others

Non-windfall approaches to sharing demonstrate pre-schoolers’ sensitivity to merit-based distributions of resources. However, such studies have not considered (1) whether epistemic aspects of task performance, such as the relative accuracy of a co-worker, influences pre-schoolers’ rates of sharing;...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Stack, James, Romero-Rivas, Carlos
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6941925/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31899918
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227375
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author Stack, James
Romero-Rivas, Carlos
author_facet Stack, James
Romero-Rivas, Carlos
author_sort Stack, James
collection PubMed
description Non-windfall approaches to sharing demonstrate pre-schoolers’ sensitivity to merit-based distributions of resources. However, such studies have not considered (1) whether epistemic aspects of task performance, such as the relative accuracy of a co-worker, influences pre-schoolers’ rates of sharing; and (2) how children’s emerging social understanding may impact resource allocations in high- and low-merit situations. These issues are of theoretical importance as they may provide new information about the scope of pre-schooler’s merit-based sharing behaviours. Moreover, as social understanding has been related to both increases and decreases in pre-schoolers’ levels of sharing, providing a merit-based assessment of this relationship would allow for a concurrent assessment of recent conflicting findings. In this study, three- and four-year-olds (N = 131) participated in an unexpected transfer task which was followed by a resource generation picture card naming task with a reliable or unreliable (high- or low-merit) co-worker (a hand puppet). The results showed that children engage in more generous rates of sharing with a high-merit co-worker. This suggests that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children and extends to epistemic aspects of task performance. However, such sharing was constrained by a self-serving bias. Finally, we were not able to detect an effect of children’s performance on the false belief task on sharing behaviours in the high- or low-merit trials, suggesting that these behaviours may not be modulated by social understanding during early childhood.
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spelling pubmed-69419252020-01-10 Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others Stack, James Romero-Rivas, Carlos PLoS One Research Article Non-windfall approaches to sharing demonstrate pre-schoolers’ sensitivity to merit-based distributions of resources. However, such studies have not considered (1) whether epistemic aspects of task performance, such as the relative accuracy of a co-worker, influences pre-schoolers’ rates of sharing; and (2) how children’s emerging social understanding may impact resource allocations in high- and low-merit situations. These issues are of theoretical importance as they may provide new information about the scope of pre-schooler’s merit-based sharing behaviours. Moreover, as social understanding has been related to both increases and decreases in pre-schoolers’ levels of sharing, providing a merit-based assessment of this relationship would allow for a concurrent assessment of recent conflicting findings. In this study, three- and four-year-olds (N = 131) participated in an unexpected transfer task which was followed by a resource generation picture card naming task with a reliable or unreliable (high- or low-merit) co-worker (a hand puppet). The results showed that children engage in more generous rates of sharing with a high-merit co-worker. This suggests that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children and extends to epistemic aspects of task performance. However, such sharing was constrained by a self-serving bias. Finally, we were not able to detect an effect of children’s performance on the false belief task on sharing behaviours in the high- or low-merit trials, suggesting that these behaviours may not be modulated by social understanding during early childhood. Public Library of Science 2020-01-03 /pmc/articles/PMC6941925/ /pubmed/31899918 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227375 Text en © 2020 Stack, Romero-Rivas http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Stack, James
Romero-Rivas, Carlos
Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others
title Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others
title_full Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others
title_fullStr Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others
title_full_unstemmed Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others
title_short Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others
title_sort merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6941925/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31899918
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227375
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