Abstract
Other-regarding preferences are important for establishing and maintaining cooperative outcomes. In this paper, we study how the formation of other-regarding preferences during childhood is related to parental background. Our subjects, aged 4–12 years, are classified into other-regarding types based on simple binary-choice dictator games. The main finding is that the children of parents with low education are less altruistic, more selfish, and more likely to be weakly spiteful. This link is robust to controlling for a rich set of children’s characteristics and class fixed effects. It also stands out against the overall development of preferences, as we find children to become more altruistic, less selfish, and less likely to be weakly spiteful with increasing age. The results, supported by a complementary analysis of World Values Survey data, suggest an important role of socialization in the formation of other-regarding preferences.
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Notes
Indirect evidence for childhood being a sensitive period in the development of other-regarding preferences is also provided by Bauer et al. (unpublished results) who find that exposure to warfare intensifies in-group egalitarianism, and that these effects are particularly enduring if warfare is experienced during childhood or adolescence. Researchers have also studied the development of other types of preferences: risk aversion (Eckel et al. 2011; Sutter et al. 2013), time discounting (Bettinger and Slonim 2007; Sutter et al. 2013), and trust (Harbaugh et al. 2003b; Sutter and Kocher 2007). Sutter et al. (2013) and Castillo et al. (2011) also show that experimental measures of preferences predict the field behaviour of children.
While the usual practice in experiments with adult subject pools is to pay for one randomly selected task, paying for each task is common in experiments with children because it is simpler to understand. A legitimate concern with paying for each task is that children may think about the total allocations resulting from the four choices instead of considering payoffs in each individual game separately. This is unlikely in our sample, since the children made choices sequentially, they did not know how many choices were to come, and they did not know what the allocations in subsequent tasks would be. Furthermore, we tested whether different combinations of choices that result in the same total payoff for the self and for the partner were chosen with different probabilities. There are four pairs of such combinations: in two of them their frequencies are significantly different at the 1 % level, in one at the 5 % level, and in one at the 12 % level (available upon request).
The design allows assessing whether other-regarding preferences vary with the familiarity and ethnicity of the recipient. Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this paper.
The experiments were also approved by the Director of the Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University, to substitute for the lack of a Human Subject Review Board in the Czech university system.
None of the choices in the games differs significantly between the sub-sample of children included in and excluded from the analysis (Table S4). Children whose parents filled out the questionnaire are on average younger and have better teacher evaluations of their performance compared to children whose parents did not fill the questionnaire. We perform several robustness checks (e.g. the Heckman sample selection model, see Table S5) and conclude that our results are unlikely to be affected by patterns in parental non-response.
Passing a school graduation exam is considered a sign of an educated person in the Czech Republic. It is a prerequisite for applying to a college, university, or other higher education institution. Secondary education without the school graduation exam corresponds to level 3c of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), while secondary school with graduation exam corresponds to levels 3a and 3b.
Previous research has shown that in the intergenerational transmission of personality and attitudes, the mother’s characteristics often play a more important role than the father’s characteristics (for a review see Loehlin 2008). We focus on the link with overall parental education since education levels of mothers and fathers in our sample are highly correlated and the results are robust to using the mother’s or father’s education instead of parental education (Table S7).
The results are robust to using OLS and probit models (available upon request).
We obtain similar results when using yet another classification into types, based on information from choices in the two costly games and disregarding choices in the costless games in which the decision-maker’s payoff is unaffected by his/her choice (Table S9). Such a classification does not allow for making combinations of choices that are inconsistent with any of the four preference types: altruistic, inequality averse, spiteful, or selfish.
Interestingly, older children are also more likely to fall into the ambiguous category, suggesting that instead of behaving selfishly some older children started forming their own fairness ideals and have not yet developed a specific theory-predicted notion of fairness.
Our parental questionnaire does not contain such questions, because asking them could significantly decrease the response rate.
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Acknowledgements
The research was supported by a grant from the CERGE-EI Foundation under a program of the Global Development Network and by the Czech Science Foundation (P402/10/P103—Chytilová, P402/12/G130—Bauer). All opinions expressed are those of the authors and have not been endorsed by any of the supporting institutions. We thank C. Camerer, A. Cappelen, M. Chu, R. Filer, W. Harbaugh, Š. Jurajda, P. Katuščák, F. Matějka, the editor David Cooper, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments and K. Bát’a, J. Cahlíková, J. Hercher, and J. Palguta for excellent research assistance. We are grateful to the headmasters of the cooperating schools and kindergartens for their support.
The research reported in this paper is not the result of a for-pay consulting relationship, nor do the authors or their employers have a financial interest in the topic of the paper that might constitute a conflict of interest.
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Bauer, M., Chytilová, J. & Pertold-Gebicka, B. Parental background and other-regarding preferences in children. Exp Econ 17, 24–46 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-013-9355-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-013-9355-y