Preschoolers agree to and enforce prosocial, but not selfish, sharing norms

Abstract

Young children act prosocially in many contexts but are somewhat selfish when it comes to sharing their resources in individual decision-making situations (e.g., the dictator game). But when deciding collectively, would they make it a binding rule for themselves and others to act selfishly in a resource sharing context? Here we used a novel “group dictator game” in a norm creation paradigm to investigate whether 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 48) would agree to and enforce a selfish or prosocial sharing norm. Children from a Western cultural background were paired with two puppets at a time. Each group member had an endowment of four stickers and faced a photograph of a recipient. In the prosocial norm condition a proposer puppet suggested to share half of one’s endowment, whereas in the selfish norm condition another proposer suggested to share nothing. The protagonist puppet then either followed or violated the suggested norm. We found that 5-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) rejected selfish proposals more often than prosocial proposals. Importantly, older (but not younger) preschoolers also enforced the prosocial (but not the selfish) norm by protesting normatively and intervening when the protagonist acted selfishly (and thus violated the norm). These results indicate that a collective decision-making context may enhance preschoolers’ prosociality and that moral considerations on the content of a proposed sharing rule influence preschoolers’ creation and enforcement of such nonarbitrary norms.