Browsing by Author "Engelmann, Jan M"

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    Concern for Group Reputation Increases Prosociality in Young Children.
    (Psychol Sci, 2018-02) Engelmann, Jan M; Herrmann, Esther; Tomasello, Michael
    The motivation to build and maintain a positive personal reputation promotes prosocial behavior. But individuals also identify with their groups, and so it is possible that the desire to maintain or enhance group reputation may have similar effects. Here, we show that 5-year-old children actively invest in the reputation of their group by acting more generously when their group's reputation is at stake. Children shared significantly more resources with fictitious other children not only when their individual donations were public rather than private but also when their group's donations (effacing individual donations) were public rather than private. These results provide the first experimental evidence that concern for group reputation can lead to higher levels of prosociality.
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    Social disappointment explains chimpanzees' behaviour in the inequity aversion task.
    (Proc Biol Sci, 2017-08-30) Engelmann, Jan M; Clift, Jeremy B; Herrmann, Esther; Tomasello, Michael
    Chimpanzees' refusal of less-preferred food when an experimenter has previously provided preferred food to a conspecific has been taken as evidence for a sense of fairness. Here, we present a novel hypothesis-the social disappointment hypothesis-according to which food refusals express chimpanzees' disappointment in the human experimenter for not rewarding them as well as they could have. We tested this hypothesis using a two-by-two design in which food was either distributed by an experimenter or a machine and with a partner present or absent. We found that chimpanzees were more likely to reject food when it was distributed by an experimenter rather than by a machine and that they were not more likely to do so when a partner was present. These results suggest that chimpanzees' refusal of less-preferred food stems from social disappointment in the experimenter and not from a sense of fairness.
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    The impact of choice on young children’s prosocial motivation
    (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2017-06) Rapp, Diotima J; Engelmann, Jan M; Herrmann, Esther; Tomasello, Michael