About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 20. Social Cognition

Abstract

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Whether for a birthday, holiday, or thank-you, gift-giving is a widespread cultural practice around the world. Ethnographic analyses have described gift-giving as a form of reciprocity, where intentions behind the gift matter for evaluating the gift exchange (Mauss, 1925). However, little is known about the social-cognitive underpinnings of gift-giving, especially in children. How do children appraise the value of a gift? Do they focus on the gift’s physical properties, or do they also consider the gift-giver’s intention? Based on prior work showing that children distinguish intentional versus accidental actions and prefer individuals who act with prosocial intentions (e.g. Vaish, Hepach, & Tomasello, 2018; Warneken et al., 2019), we hypothesized that children would consider the gift-giver’s intention. We further explored whether children would regard intentions more highly than objective features of the gift, such as culinary or artistic quality.

Here we tested whether children consider effort when assessing the quality of a gift in three experiments. Crucially, we manipulated high versus low effort that resulted in gifts of good versus poor quality. Participants saw cartoon vignettes of third-party gift exchanges at a birthday party. Two gift-givers (neighbors) brought gifts (cake or art) and briefly mentioned their effort concerning their gift. For example, in the vignette with cakes, one gift-giver said, “I just got this chocolate cake for you” and gave a cake nicely decorated with candies. The other gift-giver said, “I spent all day making this chocolate cake for you” and handed over a plain cake. Participants then evaluated the gift-givers as well as the gifts and chose with whom to further reciprocate.

In Experiment 1, we validated our method and norms of gift-giving with adults (N = 36). Results confirmed that adults indeed prioritize effort over value when assessing what the recipient would value more (p < .001).
In Experiment 2 we tested 5-6-year-old children (N = 26), showing that they too prioritize effort over value when asked what the recipient would value more (p = 0.04).

While Experiments 1 & 2 used third-party scenarios to assess participants' evaluations of others, we next asked how children would respond when they are gift recipients themselves. Thus, we launched Experiment 3 with a target sample of N = 48 4-7-year-old children, using a first-person paradigm with children as the gift recipient. The gift-givers either made an actual drawing themselves (high effort) or picked out a premade drawing (low effort). We compared how participants responded to receiving a higher quality gift resulting from lower effort (“this child just chose this one for you”) versus a lower quality gift with higher effort (“this child spent up to 30 minutes coloring this for you”). Children then reasoned about the gift-givers, gifts, and reciprocity following the same procedure as Experiments 1 and 2. Preliminary findings after 63% of data collection suggest that children are attuned to effort when receiving a gift themselves. Taken together, this suggests that both in attributing evaluations to others and in their own preferences, children favor a gift-giver's effort over the physical properties of a gift.

Author information

Author	Role
Kayley Dotson, University of Michigan	Presenting author
Felix Warneken, University of Michigan	Non-presenting author

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