There Is Intra-group Bias In The Preschoolers' Preference To Prosocial Agent And The Compensating Effect Of Empathy

Previous studies have shown that infants prefer prosocial agent to antisocial ones after seeing a social event.In order to further explore the manifestation of prosocial preferences in preschooler,the influencing factors(the influence of in-group bias),and the intervention strategies to improve for the prosocial agent preferences of early childhood,this study designed three successive experiments.Experiment 1 examines whether children's preference for prosocial agent,in addition to liking preferences,also show imitation preference for prosocial agent.The study designed fair and unfair social scenes and investigated the choice of 32 children in small classes(average age 4 years and 3 months)between the two distributors after witnessing the distribution events of fair and unfair.The results showed that,after observing the behavior of the fair agent and the unfair agent,the children not only showed their preference for the fair ones(they preferred to choose the fair ones as their playmates or gave their favorite toys to the fair ones),also prefer to imitate the gestures and pronunciation of Chinese characters of fair agent.In addition,since prosocial behavior is highly susceptible to the influence of group relations,in order to explore whether there is intra-group bias in children's preferences to fair agent,we took the intra-group and out-group(the recipient and the subject belong to the same class and the recipient and the subject belong to different classes)as an independent variable to predict the choice of 32 chidren.The results showed that when the two recipients and the children belong to the same group,they prefer the fair distributor to the unfair distributor and are more willing to imitate the pronunciation of the fair distributor.However,when the two recipients and the children belong to different groups,they do not show preference and imitation preference for the fair distributor.In daily social life,inter-group conflict and prejudice are always a significant problem to be solved,inducing empathy can induce people to care about the current needs and personal interests of others,and is an effective strategy to overcome inter-group prejudice.Therefore,on the basis of experiment 2,experiment 3 examined whether the preference for the fair agent would change before and after inducing empathy when the two recipients and the children belong to different groups.The results showed that when the two recipients and the children did not belong to the same group,the children did not have a preference for the fair agent;However,after the inducing empathy,the children prefer the fair agent and prefer imitate the behavior of fair agent.Conclusion:preschoolers' preference for prosocial agent is not only reflected in the preference for the prosocial agent,but also in imitation of their behaviors;There is intra-group bias in the preschoolers' preference to fair agent;Inducing empathy has compensatory effect on intragroup bias in preschoolers' preference to fair agent.