5-7 Years Old Children The Wrong Decision And Its Relationship With The Secondary Belief In The Group Game Game

In recent years, the economic game theory has become an important method in studying individual’s distributive behavior in development psychology. Researchers investigated people’s decision-making in these games combined with different cognitive tasks. They found people in different ages showed their own characteristics, factors like social distance, theory of mind influenced people’s decision-making. Compared to the individual game researches, group game study is less, and there is even less researches about younger children.This study investigated eighty5-to7-year-old children’s group decision making in economic games and its relation with theory of mind by two consecutive economic games and second-order false belief task. The first experiment measured children’s individual allocation and group allocation in dictator games and ultimatum games by control the game situation and the player teams’ social distance. Results showed that:(1) In both games, there was no difference in both individual and group offers of these three age groups.(2)There was no gender difference in group economic games. Boys exhibited same with girls in the same game situation.(3) Game’s situation did influence children’s allocation. Children offered more in fair and care induced situations than they did in the standard game situation, but there was no difference in fair and care induced situations.(4) Children’s decision making showed fair preference within group and self-interested preference between groups. Social distance, game situation and player’s experience influenced subjects’ decision making at the same time.(5) Individual decision making and the followed up group decision making were coherent, both showed self-interested and altruistic characteristics. The second experiment measured children’s second-order belief attribution to research the relation between this reasoning ability and group decision making. Result revealed that there was low relationship between second-order belief attribution and group decision making in younger children’s economic games.In summary, younger children showed fair preference and utilitarian in group economic games, and the gender difference was not significant. Children pursued the rules of dividing equally within group and expanding self-interests between groups. Factors like social distance, game situation and player’s experience influenced children’s allocation, and establishing fair and care situation could promote children’s pro-social allocation. The relation between second-order belief attribution and group game decision making was low. These results could complement the existing economic game theory research and children’s distribution justice study, and was inspired for the moral education in daily life.