Exploration Of Adolescents' Indirect Reciprocity Behavior

Reciprocal behavior has important meanings to the social development of individual.Reciprocity insists of direct and indirect reciprocity. With the development of the Internet+ Times, the proportion of indirect reciprocal behaviors in human communication has been increasing.Indirect reciprocity behavior refers to individual interaction with strangers in society. Indirect reciprocity behavior can be divided into two types:upstream and downstream reciprocity.At present, the study on indirect reciprocity is more common in foreign researchers, whether there is indirect reciprocity behavior among domestic adolescents. and what factors influence the indirect reciprocity behavior, which is a topic of interest to teachers.The study uses economic decision-making situation to explore adolescents' indirect reciprocity in a middle and high school in Xi'an.96 middle and high school students (46 High School students,24 male,22 female;50 Middle School students, male 24, female 26) participate in two tasks:"Pay It Forward" task (i.e., the upstream reciprocity) and "Third Party Altruism"task (i.e., the downstream reciprocal).We found that in "Pay It Forward" task, both middle and high school subjects assigned more to a third party when they received equal distribution (compared to the unequal distribution),and their pass amout was more than 0 MU.We concluded that the upstream reciprocal behavior exists in the high school and middle school students. In both distribution conditions(35/5 and 20/20), middle and high school group's pass amount does not exist significant differences, i.e., there is no difference between different groups as to the upstream reciprocity behavior. Further exploratory analysis found that high school group's pass amount difference was regulated by their empathy concern level.In "Third Party Altruism" task,we found that as the third party, middle and high school groups were more likely to punish the cheater (first party) and help the victim (the second party)when they saw the unequal distribution between others. We concluded that the downstream reciprocal behavior exists in the high school and middle school students.In both distribution conditions, the probability of punishment (first party) and help (the second party) exsisted no significantly difference, that is to say, there is no between group difference as to adolescents' downstream reciprocity behavior. In addition, downward reciprocity is also influenced by other factors, such as grade and distributional interactions. Comparing with the 20/20 allocation, the high school students are more likely to choose "punish" as the increase of empathy concern level in 35/5 allocation, and middle school students are more likely to choose "keep" in the unfair distribution (35/5) than in fair distribution (20/20). The probability of punishment in middle school students was significantly improved when compared to the high school subjects when they were fairly distributed. In the case of unfair distribution, participants in the middle school group were more likely to transfer more than those in the high school group.The study showed that the existence of indirect reciprocity behavior in adolescents, and there is no group difference between middle and high school subjects. The study revealed the existence of indirect reciprocity among adolescents as well as built strong base for further research on adolescents'indirect reciprocity behavior.