Children distributed fewer rewards to high performers who were motivated by the pursuit of profit

The profit motive: Implications for children’s reasoning about merit-based resource distribution. Shuai Shao, Jingrong Huang, Li Zhao, Gail D. Heyman. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 226, February 2023, 105563. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105563

Highlights

• Judgments about how to reward high performers were examined among 6- to 11-year-olds.

• Intrinsically-motivated performers were compared to performers motivated by profit.

• Participants distributed less to the high performers who were motived by profit.

• With age, the distributions were increasingly sensitive to the motive information.

• Wariness of individuals who have a profit motive may have its origins in childhood.

Abstract: How to distribute resources in a fair way is a fundamental source of conflict in human societies. A central dilemma that people begin to grapple with during childhood is the extent to which individuals should be rewarded based on merit at the expense of equality. The current study examined children’s reasoning about this dilemma by testing whether they are sensitive to information about the motives of highly productive people when determining whether they should receive extra compensation. Across two studies, children (6- to 11-year-olds, total N = 143) judged high performers to be less deserving of extra resources when they were motivated by profit rather than being intrinsically motivated, and this pattern was more pronounced among the older children. The findings demonstrate that, with age, children increasingly consider motives when deciding whether productivity should be rewarded and that the tendency of adults to view profit motives as problematic has origins during childhood.

Keywords: Profit motiveUlterior motivesIntrinsic motivationExtrinsic motivationResource allocation

General discussion

The current research examined the effects of motives for performance on children’s judgments about the extent to which people should be rewarded based on merit. In addressing this question, we hypothesized that high performers motivated by profit would be seen as less worthy of extra rewards than intrinsically motivated high performers. We found evidence for this systematic tendency by 7 years of age in Study 1, and it was highly robust among 10- and 11-year-olds in both studies. These results show for the first time that information about ulterior motives can have implications for children’s merit-based distribution decisions.

Notably, older children in Study 2 tended to preferentially reward intrinsically motivated high performers over profit-motived high performers even when they had the option to reward both equally. We also found evidence that older children thought that profit-motived high performers should be given no extra rewards at all (Study 2) or even should be penalized (Study 1) relative to typical performers. This provides the first evidence that there may be a profit motive penalty that erases any notion that merit should be rewarded.

Our findings of a profit motive penalty are similar to anti-profit beliefs that have been observed among adults. For example, Bhattacharjee and colleagues (2017) found that profit-seeking businesses were viewed as harmful and immoral even when they were able to bring about salient social benefits. Our results suggest that children showed a similar pattern of reasoning by as young as 7 years, as indicated by the findings of Study 1 in which profit-driven high performers were rewarded less than typical performers despite their higher level of contribution to the class.

Our findings of age-related change are in line with the developmental research showing age-related changes in reasoning about ulterior motives. For example, Heyman and colleagues (2014) found that when judging people’s prosocial behaviors, 8- to 10-year-olds recognized ulterior motives associated with reputational enhancement, but 6- and 7-year-olds did not. Taken together, these findings suggest that children become increasingly sensitive to the implications of a broad range of ulterior motives during middle childhood and that, with age, children increasingly view individuals who hold such motives as both less altruistic and less worthy of being rewarded.

Our findings contribute to research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation given that the profit motive is a form of extrinsic motivation. Previous research in this area has mainly focused on the behavioral consequences of extrinsic rewards and motivations (see Deci et al., 1999, for a review). For example, Ulber and colleagues (2016) showed that rewarding children for their prosocial behaviors attenuated their subsequent costly sharing. Good and Shaw (2022) showed that this distinction could also have evaluative implications; by 6 years of age, children showed a preference for an individual who was intrinsically motivated over one who was extrinsically motivated by reputational gain. The current work extends these findings by showing that the negative evaluative implications apply to another type of extrinsic motive—the motive for profit.

The current research also enriches the moral development literature by showing the important role of intentions in judgments and decision making. Previous research has documented that even young infants are sensitive to other agents’ intentions (Geraci et al., 2022, Hamlin, 2013, Kanakogi et al., 2017, Strid and Meristo, 2020). In particular, considerations of helpful or harmful intentions emerge within the first year of life (e.g., helping: Hamlin, 2013; distributing: Geraci et al., 2022). Our results, along with those of Good and Shaw (2022), build on these findings by showing that intentions that have no salient moral valence can also have evaluative implications. Our research is also in line with research showing that intentions, but not outcomes, are central to children’s moral judgments (Cushman et al., 2013, Killen et al., 2011).

One critical question that needs further exploration is why children and adults dislike or even penalize profit motives. It is likely that profit motives can signal selfishness and therefore are viewed as incompatible with societal good (Bhattacharjee et al., 2017). This may occur because the negative implications of profit motives are more salient in daily life than the positive implications (Bhattacharjee et al., 2017). In addition, it should be noted that the current research does not distinguish between rewarding high effort versus high productivity, which will be important to examine in future research (Noh et al., 2019).

It is worth noting that the current research was conducted in China. One important question to address in future research is the extent to which our findings are culturally specific versus generalizable. At least some prior findings on children’s resource allocation suggest that there may be cross-cultural differences. For example, a recent study showed that when recipients differed in their productivity, children from more individualistic cultures were more likely to distribute rewards equitably than children from collectivist cultures (Huppert et al., 2019). This may be because collectivist cultures tend to emphasize consideration of what is beneficial to the group (Triandis, 1989). However, it is also possible that there is a greater focus on rewarding individual achievement among children in China than in the West given that Chinese school culture is highly competitive and success is commonly defined in terms of relative achievement (Zhao & Heyman, 2018).

In sum, we examined whether children’s beliefs about rewarding merit-worthy behavior depend on the motive of the individual exhibiting the behavior. We found that children perceive profit-driven high performers to be less deserving of rewards than intrinsically motivated high performers and that, with age, motive information increasingly affects children’s judgments. These findings advance our understanding of deservingness in resource allocation and the development of intention-based judgments and decision making. They also provide evidence that the concerns about profit motives observed in adults have developmental roots and can be understood in terms of intuitive ways of thinking about motives that emerge early in life.