Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： How children allocate resources in group context is affected by group factors such as group identification, group status and group norms. Faced with the conflicts between group factors and fairness, some children stick to fairness, while others might change their minds to benefit related groups. First and foremost, the influence on children's distributive justice by in-group bias varies with age. It begins to have an impact on children's distributive justice around the age of 4, peaks at the age of 6, and slides down at the age of 8, when children prefer fairness the most. The impact of in-group bias is also closely related to how intensively children are involved in distributive tasks. The deeper children's interest is drawn into the task, the greater the impact is. When allocating resources among individuals with different merits, children are far less affected by in-group bias. What's more, the impact of in-group bias is also affected by other factors such as inter-group relations, the number and value of resources, the gender of distributor and accepter. Yet studies on these factors are limited and deeper explorations are to be expected. In the second place, children tend to match or compensate the disadvantaged and rectify injustice formed by group status. On one hand, System Justification Theory (SJT) might be an explanation of the tendency to match injustice, which states that children may justify current social situation, attributing injustice to justice reasons so that to match existing injustice is quite fair for them. On the other hand, the two opposite choices (to match or to rectify) could be explained by cultural differences, specificity of groups and the development of children's fairness cognition. Thirdly, children's distributive justice is also affected by group norms. When group norms contradict with fairness, whether it is a norm of a specific group or a norm formed out of culture and social structure, they will leave an influence on both children's evaluation on others' allocation behavior and children's own allocation decisions. Group norms are as inevitable as other group factors, yet limited research has been conducted on this issue, especially on how fairness interact with both specific and generic norms. Moreover, individual factors are also to be considered when children allocate resources in group context. Among all the individual factor, theory of mind is closely linked to children's resource allocations. Generally, children with higher theory of mind are more likely to be capable of analyzing group factors and balancing motivations to make fair decisions. With massive studies on in-group bias, we have mastered its features of many aspects. However, the impact of group status and group norms on children's distributive justice remains unknown and intrigued. More attention should be cast on these two factors respectively. Future studies should also have attempts to probe into the interaction effects among these three group factors with more exquisite designs and tasks, thus making more sense of children's distributive justice in group context. Individual factors that matter in group context are also to be explored. It is still quite a mystery to us how theory of mind is related to children's resource allocation with information of group status and group norms in mind. Furthermore, theory of mind can also make a difference on distributive behavior of exceptional children. Clarifying its mechanism will offer a guide for future work on improve prosocial behavior of exceptional children. Meanwhile, more issues closely related to theory of mind need to be discussed, such as inhibitory control, working memory and individual experience, which also bring about changes to children's allocation decisions in group context.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Reading and theory of mind (ToM) both play important roles in the development of children. A large number of previous studies reveal that reading and ToM may have two-way promotion effects. On the one hand, shared reading with parents or teachers enables children to initiate joint attention. In this process, children and storytellers use a lot of terms of mental state to communicate with each other, and they can also construct an alternative social situation through social imagination and perspective-taking ability. In daily life, children will also understand stories by guessing and inferring the thoughts, intentions, desires and emotions of the characters through simulating real social activity, which promotes the development of children’s ToM. On the other hand, numerous studies have shown that ToM can also promote the development of children's reading ability in a lot of aspects. For example, in the process of reading, ToM can help children to improve their abilities to establish a macro view of reading, use metacognitive reading strategies, construct story situation models, and even promote their micro ability to understand specific phrases, sentences, discourses and multi-text materials. What's more, ToM may increase the reader's ability to express and monitor the characters' thoughts and emotions during the reading process. When readers can understand and express the mental states and emotions of the characters in the story, it indicates that they may have made some inferences and judgments about the mental states which are unclearly stated in the story. In this case, readers can understand the story more easily and are more likely to find the fun of reading, which may trigger more reading behaviors, thus leading to more frequent use of ToM and promote its development. Both reading and ToM show a good trend of mutual promotion and common development. In addition to behavioral research, further neurophysiological evidence shows that there is some overlap between the neural activity of reading and ToM. In the reading process, the default network shows strong activation. As the main support network for social cognition, default network also plays an important role in the development of ToM. In addition, the mirror nervous system contributes to the interaction between reading and ToM as well. The mirror nervous system enables individuals to understand or experience the actions, thoughts, intentions, and feelings of others. In addition, reading literary works, especially literary novels, can improve the individual's ToM by enhancing the mirror nervous system. Both behavioral and brain mechanism studies support that there may be a potential two-way promoting relationship between reading and ToM. In the future, it is necessary to pay more attention to the potential relationship between ToM and reading. Further in-depth and long-term longitudinal follow-up studies are needed to provide abundant empirical evidence for the relationship between reading and ToM. In addition, more attention should be paid to the development of ToM in school education and its positive influence on children's self-protection and compliance with moral norms. In line with the development of science and technology, it is also necessary to pay more attention to the influence of multimedia reading on children's ToM. Besides, in daily home reading or school teaching, parents and teachers should make efforts to increase intervention training to improve children's ToM and reading comprehension ability. For example, feedback training in reading is beneficial to promote children's perspective-taking and ToM, which includes emboldening children to talk deeply about their mental states and desires, asking children more questions, and encouraging children to play pretend games. All of these interventions may, to varying degrees, promote children to think about different views and mental states in various ways during reading process.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2022-03-08
Abstract：
"Children’s resource allocation in group context is affected by group factors such as
group identification, group status and group norms. Faced with the conflicts between group factors
and fairness, some children stick to fairness, while others vary their decisions. These three group
factors influence children’s allocation decisions respectively. In addition, individual factors are
also involved when children allocating resources in group context. Future studies should take
group factors into consideration, especially how the three factors interact with each other to make
more sense of distributive justice in group context. Individual factors that matter in group context
are also to be explored.
"
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
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