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The role of inhibition in young children’s altruistic behaviour

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Abstract

By behaving altruistically, individuals voluntarily reduce their benefits in order to increase their partners’. This deviation from a self-interest-maximizing function may be cognitively demanding, though. This study investigates whether altruistic sharing in 4- to 6-year-old children, assessed by a dictator game (DG), is related to three measures of executive functioning, that is, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. We found that children who turned out to be altruistic in the DG performed better on an inhibition task than non-altruists did. This finding lends support to the hypothesis that altruistic sharing might be somewhat constrained by the child’s ability to inhibit a natural tendency to preserve his or her own resources. Much research is needed to understand the role of inhibitory control in the development of costly sharing and the consolidation of inequity aversion.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the staff of Jose Felix Restrepo School for letting us use their premises and to Emmanuel Monteilhet for their contribution to the writing of this manuscript. During writing, Fernando Colmenares’ work was supported by project grant PSI2011-29016-C02-01 from MINECO (Spain).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Psicología, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia

    David Aguilar-Pardo

  2. Grupo UCM de Estudio del Comportamiento Animal y Humano, Departamento de Psicobiología, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    David Aguilar-Pardo & Fernando Colmenares

  3. Departamento de Metodología de las Ciencias del Comportamiento, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Rosario Martínez-Arias

Authors
  1. David Aguilar-Pardo
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  2. Rosario Martínez-Arias
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  3. Fernando Colmenares
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Correspondence to David Aguilar-Pardo.

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Aguilar-Pardo, D., Martínez-Arias, R. & Colmenares, F. The role of inhibition in young children’s altruistic behaviour. Cogn Process 14, 301–307 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-013-0552-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-013-0552-6

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