Individual Psychological Theory Ability And Emotional States Affect Decisions

The dictator game is one of the paradigm to examine the fair behavior of the people, in this paradigm the owner of the resources has been known as the proposer, they have the right to assign the resource in their favor to the other person in the game, that is the recipient. Traditional economic theories predict that rational allocators in the dictator game should maximize earnings, and keep most of the resources to themselves, but in the actual allocation that is not the case. The decision of allocation of the proposer is influenced by a variety of factors, researchers have investigated the factors in different angles, but few research to study the preschool children’s ability of the theory of mind and the emotion state on the proposer’s allocation decision, two experiments are designed to discuss this issue.Experiment1selected3-6-year olds as subjects to investigate the ability of their emotion perspective-taking and false-belief understanding, and the relationship between these two abilities and the children’s allocation decision in the dictator game; Experiment2chose the recipient’s happy, sad and angry emotional photos to investigate the affect that the recipient’s emotion state to the allocation decision of the proposer.The results indicated that (1) In general, the percent of subjects who allocate the0-3and4-6stickers were significantly higher than the percent of the subjects who allocate7-10stickers, but the allocation decision of the children in dictator game did not show significant development trend in the age;(2) The children’s emotion perspective-taking and false-belief understanding had significant positive correlations with the allocation decision, further aggression analysis suggest that the performance of the children’s in false-belief understanding had a significant prediction to their allocation decision, analysis of variance showed that the children’s allocation decision of high-score group and the low-score group in the emotion perspective-taking and false-belief understanding had no significant difference;(3) For the recipient of different emotional state, the allocation of3-5-year olds had no significant difference;(4) For male and female recipient, the children showed significant difference in allocation, for3-year olds, they allocated significantly less stickers to male than female recipient, for happy recipient, the children also allocated significantly less stickers to male than female, at the same time for the male recipient,3-year olds allocated significant less than5-year olds, but for the female recipient, there was no this age difference.