Developmental Characteristics And Affecting Factors Of Third-party Punishment Within 6 To 11 Years Old Children

The issue of maintaining fairness have received widespread attention from researchers.Altruistic punishment,as one of the most common behaviors in the process of maintaining social fairness,plays a very important role in promoting and maintaining cooperation between groups and individuals.Penalties for those who violate social norms may be executed by "second parties" with direct interests or by "third parties" without direct interests.Studies have shown that the second party's behavior of maintaining fairness is susceptible to personal or contextual factors,while the third party's behavior of maintaining fairness is more stable and more common in life.As the saying goes,"At the sight of injustice,draw a sword and render help",which vividly describes the process of third-party punishment for us.School-age children already have a certain sense of social norms,but there are few studies on the development characteristics of children's third-party punishment and their influencing factors.Therefore,this study selected 273 children aged 6-11 as the research object,and examined the age development characteristics and influencing factors of children's third-party punishment behaviors by letting participants complete the game task of Dictator Game.This study includes three experiments: Experiment 1 explores the development characteristics of third-party punishment for children aged 6-11 under different distribution scenarios.Experiment 2 explores the authority of teachers for children aged 6-11 under different distribution scenarios.Experiment 3 explores the impact of the authority of the head teacher on third-party punishment for children aged 6-11 in the context of different distribution schemes.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)Third-party punishment of children has the characteristics of age.The penalties for children aged 6-7 are significantly lower than those for children aged8-9 and 10-11,and increased with age.While started to declined from age 8-9,indicating that children aged 8-9 was the turning point of third-party punishment.(2)Allocation schemes have a significant impact on child third-party punishment.The higher the level of injustice,the higher the child's punishment,and the more altruistic behavior is shown.(3)Teacher authority has no significant effect on children's third-partypunishment.Children were not absolute obedience to authority,they will consider the fairness of the code of conduct,the characteristics of authority figures,and their relationship with authority figures.(4)The head teacher's authority has a significant impact on children's third-party punishment behavior.Under the distribution scheme(9: 1),the penalties for head teacher are significantly lower than those for peers.(5)Children's perception of unfairness and anger gradually become stronger as the degree of unfairness increases.(6)Under the allocation schemes(9: 1)and(7: 3),both fair perception and anger can significantly predict the third-party punishment negatively.The higher the child's perception of fairness,the higher the level of non-anger,resulting in less punishment.