Children with siblings differ from only children in their sharing behaviour

ABSTRACT

China offers a natural laboratory for comparing the development of only children and children with siblings. We examined potential differences in the way that they expected a protagonist to allocate resources between two recipients with different social relationships, e.g. a sibling vs. a stranger, a friend vs. a stranger, and a sibling vs. a friend. Four- to six-year-old children participated in a third-party Resource Allocation Task and an Emotion Judgment Task. Children with siblings were more likely than only children to expect resources to be shared with a sibling over a friend. In addition, as compared to only children, children with siblings expected someone experiencing non-sharing behaviour to feel sadder. These findings suggest that the difference in kin-preference between children with siblings and only children is due to their respective life experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Only children
• children with siblings
• sharing behaviour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project of China under grant number 17NDJC073YB; and the Career Development Program for Junior Researchers at Hangzhou Normal University under grant number 18JYXK034.

Notes on contributors

Erping Xiao

Erping Xiao is an associate professor in Preschool Education. Her research is focused on children’s cognition, developmental psychology and cross-cultural psychology. Her professional background is psychology.

Jia Shen

Jia Shen was an undergraduate student of applied psychology, she is interested in developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology and human behaviour ecology.

Paul Harris

Paul Harris is a psychologist interested in the early development of cognition, emotion, and imagination. He is currently studying how young children judge what they are told about the world – especially when the claims are hard to check because they pertain to the past, the future, hidden causal processes, or the existence of extraordinary beings.