Research on the Influence of the Low Socio-economic Status on Prosocial Behaviors of Urban Children

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Journal of Central University of Finance & Economics ›› 2023, Vol. 0 ›› Issue (2) : 86-100.

CUI Chi, DAI Ming, REN Tian-ming

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Abstract

Socio-economic status(SES)plays an important role in shaping children's social preferences, but there are few studies of the SES effect on children from cities.In this paper, we investigated how the socio-economic status impacts school children's prosocial behaviors with an experimental method.Subjects are educated at the same primary school in Changchun but with different socio-economic status.We find that 1)with the respect to complex fairness ideals, high SES children are more likely to be labor-preferred than the low SES, while low SES children are more likely to hold egalitarianism.2)As for other-regarding preferences, high SES children are more prosocial and generous than the low SES, but low SES children are more spiteful than the high SES.3)Compared with high SES children, low SES children like to have a higher level of willingness to compete more than the high SES.From above results, it illustrates that although children shared the same high-quality educating resources, children with different socio-economic status still have gaps in complex fairness views, other-regarding preferences, and the willingness to compete.We should take more importance of cares and education for low SES children to eliminate differences.

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Socio-economic status / Prosocial behavior / Complex fairness ideal / Other-regarding pre-ference / Willingness to compete

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CUI Chi, DAI Ming, REN Tian-ming. Research on the Influence of the Low Socio-economic Status on Prosocial Behaviors of Urban Children[J]. Journal of Central University of Finance & Economics, 2023, 0(2): 86-100

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