Perspective-taking In Children's Affective Decision-Making

Affective decision making is the capacity of making avail choose from more than two different kinds of or magnitude of values.One well-established paradigm for studying affective decision-making is delay of gratification,in which children choose between a small immediate reward and a large delayed reward.Early studies found that affective decision-making develops rapidly between 3 and 4 years,and social cognition,especially perspective taking plays an important role in the development of children's affective decision-making.Prencipe and Zelazo explored the role of perspective taking in children's affective decision-making using a modified delay of gratification paradigm.In their study,half of the children chose for themselves(Self condition),and half chose for the experimenter(Other condition).3-year-olds chose delayed rewards in the Other condition but made impulsive choices in the Self condition.Compared to 3-year-olds,4-year-olds performed better in the Self condition and worse in the Other condition.They believe that the results suggest 3-year-olds took either a subjective,first-person perspective(for Self)or an objective, third-person perspective(for Other).Four-year-olds integrated these perspectives,considering a third-person perspective in the Self condition and the experimenter's subjective perspective in the Other condition(i.e.,her desire for immediate gratification).In this research we used two experiments to examined the developmental trend of affective decision-making and the role of perspective taking in it on Chinese children.In experiment 1,children are asked to chose between a small immediate reward and a large delayed reward for themselves(Self condition),and for the experimenter(Other condition).The result found that there is no difference between chose for self and chose for other on neither 3-year-olds nor 4-year-olds.It is a different developmental trend contrasting with the result of North American children.Another difference result found in Chinese children is that for both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds,their scores in the Other condition than the Self condition were significant higher than chance responding(half times chose delay).It is difficult to explain to the 3-year-olds in China could have integrated a subjective perspective and an objective perspective already.Another possible explanation for there is no difference between chose for self and chose for other on 3-year-olds is they could not distinguish the viewpoint of themselves and others'.Based the results of experiment 1,we designed experiment 2.In experiment 2,we also asked the children to make decision for themselves and for a research assistant based delay of gratifcation procedure.But we offered some information about the research assistant;therefore the information could as a cue to help children to make the useful choice for other people.We predicted that,for 3-year-olds,the ability of perspective taking has not well developed,and they could not distinguish others' perspectives from their owns.So there is no difference between chose for self and chose for other in any kind of information groups.In contrast,for 4-year-olds,the ability of perspective taking has got developed by a certain degree,and they could distinguish others' perspectives from their owns.They also could make different choices for others based on different information.The findings from experiment 2 were consistent with our hypothesis.In sum,children's ability of affective decision making is related to perspective taking which show developmental change during the preschool period in the task of delay of gratification for self and others.As perspective taking develops,children come to approach motivationally significant decision for other people.