If I'm right that kindness to strangers is
in some sense unnatural, this makes predictions about children.
And what I want to do in this very short lecture is talk about
some research that uses the same economic
games to study the behavior of young children.
So we, we know that children respond often
very poorly to strangers, they get very anxious
next to strangers, they panic psychologists call it stranger
anxiety, but we also know that when we are
old enough to participate in these economic games they
behave quite differently from adults in the same society.
So adults, you'll remember, when given the dictator game,
are quite generous, giving 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50%.
Kids don't. There are now dozens
of studies where you test children at
different ages, where you give them some resource.
And then they get to split the resource with other individuals.
And, what we find is that that they give a lot less.