Third-Party Intervention in 3-5-Year-Old Children: The Role of Unfair Perception and Cognitive Empathy
Description
This study investigated the third-party intervention behavior of 3-5-year-old children and the roles of unfair perception and cognitive empathy. In Experiment 1, third-party punishment and third-party compensation tasks were employed, revealing that when faced with unfair distribution, children tended to choose third-party compensation, and the degree of compensation was significantly higher than the intensity of punishment. Experiment 2 further discovered that under different resource relationship conditions, higher levels of unfair perception could promote children's third-party intervention. Age was found to facilitate children's intervention in unfair distributions and inhibit their intervention in fair distributions. In Experiment 3, children were randomly assigned to the cognitive empathy group and the control group. The results showed that cognitive empathy promoted children with a poor resource preference to choose third-party punishment. This study provides evidence from a developmental perspective on the impact mechanisms of unfair perception and cognitive empathy on third-party intervention behavior. It emphasizes the role of third-party intervention in maintaining social fairness and offers empirical suggestions for fostering prosocial behavior in young children. We used SPSS 24.0 and R 4.2.2 software for data analysis in this study. Due to the non-normality of the data, Friedman tests were employed to compare the differences in third-party compensation and punishment intent and magnitude under the three allocation conditions. Additionally, as the data did not meet the normality assumption of residuals for linear regression, generalized linear models were run using the lme4 package in R software to examine the influence of gender, age, and perceived unfairness frequency on children's compensation and punishment willingness and degree. Regarding the data, the authors uploaded part of the study materials with the guidelines and detailed data for each study (sav.) and provided part of the R code.
Files
Steps to reproduce
We used SPSS 24.0 and R 4.2.2 software for data analysis in this study. Due to the non-normality of the data, Friedman tests were employed to compare the differences in third-party compensation and punishment intent and magnitude under the three allocation conditions. Additionally, as the data did not meet the normality assumption of residuals for linear regression, generalized linear models were run using the lme4 package in R software to examine the influence of gender, age, and perceived unfairness frequency on children's compensation and punishment willingness and degree. Regarding the data, the authors uploaded part of the study materials with the guidelines and detailed data for each study (sav.) and provided part of the R code.