The little dictator: Understanding altruism in young children

This study explores the role of framing, time pressure (TP), and gender in modulating altruism in preschoolers (4- and 5-year-olds, N = 115), using a Dictator Game (DG) paradigm. Besides confirming a strong tendency toward altruistic sharing in this age cohort, results allow us to investigate the psychological factors behind such a tendency. Initial resource allocation is manipulated by presenting both a Give and a Take condition to participants, which reveals the combined influence of status quo bias (more resources are shared in the Take condition than in the Give condition) and the endowment effect (fewer resources are shared in the Give condition than in the Take condition). Introducing TP results in greater sharing across both conditions, which confirms previous results and improves on them, allowing us to clarify that the intuitive heuristic activated by TP favors sharing specifically, rather than mere preservation of the status quo (otherwise we would observe increased sharing with TP only in the Take condition). Finally, a significant interaction between framing and gender is observed, with girls sharing more than boys in the Give condition and less than boys in the Take condition. This suggests that the traditional view of girls as being more generous than boys in DGs may be an experimental artifact of overreliance on Give-only paradigms, and it reveals instead that girls are more sensitive to fairness, whereas boys are more influenced by respect for the initial resource allocation. Overall, these findings provide valuable insight into the psychological determinants of altruism in early childhood, with important implications for adult studies as well.