Pay to play: Children’s emerging ability to use acts of generosity for selfish ends

Adults will offer favors to advance their standing and solicit a favor in return, using ostensibly prosocial acts strategically for selfish ends. Here we assessed the developmental emergence of such strategic behaviors in which individuals are generous to elicit future reciprocation from others. In a novel experimental paradigm with children aged 3 to 7 years, we tested whether children are willing to share more valuable resources when this act could prompt subsequent reciprocation. In an Experimental condition, children could share a more attractive or less attractive resource with a person who they knew would subsequently choose to play a game with either the children or another individual. In the Control condition, children knew the person would play alone. Across two studies, we found that over repeated trials, 5- and 7-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, learned to share more valuable resources in the Experimental condition than in the Control condition. This shows that older age groups were able to quickly learn how to influence the subsequent partner choice in a novel situation. We address theoretical questions about the various types of reciprocity as being supported by different psychological mechanisms and discuss whether the current results could be explained by children’s emerging ability for future-directed thinking.Depto. de Investigación y Psicología en EducaciónFac. de PsicologíaTRUEpu

Australian not by blood, but by character: soldiers and refugees in Australian children's picture books

In recent years, Australian children’s picture books dealing with the First World War have balanced the increasingly sentimentalized construct of the Australian soldier as a victim of trauma and the traditional use of Australian war literature as a means of exploring national identity. It is an approach that has proved quite malleable, for variations of it have been used in children’s picture books dealing with the far more polemic issue of refugees. By drawing on this framework authors and illustrators position refugees as victims of trauma who have displayed qualities that are entirely consistent with a construct of national identity grounded in martial achievement. Readers of these texts are encouraged to welcome these arrivals at a literal level as new citizens and symbolically as new inductees into a pervasive construct of national identity