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.
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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.