Doing more than expected
The role of the recipient's neediness in children's perception of their relative prosociality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9646161 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bar Levy-Friedman (Ben-Gurion University , Beer-Sheva), Bar Levy‐Friedman (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Tehila Kogut (0000-0001-8652-5112, Ben-Gurion University , Beer-Sheva, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 441-450 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Child Development (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-3920 • E-ISSN: 1467-8624 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/cdev.14171 |
| PMID | 39302248 |
| OpenAlex | W4402697946 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 49 |
This study examined children's self-assessment of their prosociality, relative to average peers, in situations where the recipient is described as “needy” versus “not needy” (at a school of average socioeconomic level in south Israel; N = 158; aged 6–12 years; 51% males, December–May 2021). The results show that older children exhibited the better-than-average (BTA) effect by seeing themselves as more generous than peers. In contrast, younger children displayed the worse-than-average effect by expecting peers to be more generous than themselves. However, both effects were attenuated (ηp2 = .16) when the recipient was described as “needy,” leading to higher expectations of sharing from oneself and others. This implies that besides children's motivational tendency to self-evaluate as BTA, they also base their evaluations on actual environmental cues
Developmental psychology · Perception · Population · Prosocial behavior · Socioeconomic status · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion · Demography · Optimism, Hope, and Well-being · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction · Psychology · Social Psychology
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I Should but I Won’t
A fundamental prediction error
On Being Better but not Smarter than Others
Social Comparisons and Pro-social Behavior
Egalitarianism in young children
Children's self-evaluation of their prosociality when comparing themselves with a specific versus abstract other
Individualism and Collectivism
The Self in Social Judgment
Self‐Favoring Biases, Self‐Presentation, and the Self‐Other Asymmetry in Social Comparison
The Effect of Recipient Identifiability and Neediness on Children's Sharing Behavior
Knowing what I should, doing what I want
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Personal contact, individuation, and the better-than-average effect
The development of prosociality among Christian Arab children in Israel
The association between religiousness and children’s altruism
The development of empathy in twins
Children’s recognition of fairness and others’ welfare in a resource allocation task
Developmental analysis of the role of social comparison in self-evaluation
Why we are fairer than others
Egocentrism and focalism in unrealistic optimism (and pessimism)
A Theory of Social Comparison Processes
Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives
Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments
Ambiguity and self-evaluation
Error and bias in comparative judgment
Ingroup favoritism in cooperation
Illusion and well-being
Individualism and Good Works
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |