Investigando a pró-socialidade em crianças e sua associação com o status socioeconômico

Abstract

There is an ongoing effort by researchers to understand what are the universal factors that favor prosociality in its various forms. One of these factors is socioeconomic status (SES). Evidence on the association between status and prosociality is controversial both in children and adults. To contribute to the discussion, we investigated this association in children aged 7-11 years. Before the empirical studies, we discuss the evolution of hierarchies in human societies and how SES is associated with prosocial behavior. We posit that it is a complex and malleable association, being necessary to investigate what are the intermediary factors. To answer this, we elaborate the first empirical chapter that serves as a basis for the others: we compare prosociality measures. We observed that economic games, more specifically the Public Goods Game and the Dictator Game, showed inter-situational consistency with caveats, and that had no external validity when compared to the behavioral frequency of children in the classroom (naturalistic observation). These results do not invalidate the use of games, but emphasize the importance of interpreting their results within specific contexts. In the next two chapters we bring the status stratification: we investigated association using different SES parameters and different prosocial measures, in addition to individual and contextual factors. The results are mixed, but in none of them low-SES children cooperated less than another group of children. They cooperated more or didn't differ. We emphasize that the association between SES and prosociality was influenced when the stratification parameter was objective or subjective SES; when the social context was anonymous or non-anonymous; or when the child interacted with their own classmates, an unknown classroom, or in a non-social condition. Also, when the stratification parameter was parental education, there was a U-shaped association for cooperation with their classmates. We discuss the results using theories from different areas such as evolutionary psychology sociology and anthropology. In addition to proposing new methodologies to investigate pro-sociality in children, as far as we know, we are the first to investigate the association between SES and prosociality in Brazilian children through multi-methods.