From an early age, children act generously towards one another, but the situational features that promote generous decision-making remain under investigation. The current study tests the impact of being identifiable—as a recipient of generosity, a giver, or both—on children's generosity. Six-year-old children (N = 129) allocated resources to a recipient during a video chat paradigm. Children were most generous when both they and the recipient could identify one another (i.e., in the case of mutual identification). Children were less generous in an anonymous situation and in ‘one-sided’ situations in which only the recipient or only the giver was identifiable to the other child. These results illustrate that mutual identification, an ecologically valid experience of being able to identify and be identified by a recipient of one's generous action, is an especially powerful contributor to generous decision-making in childhood. Further, insofar as increasing generosity among children is a goal, these results indicate that increasing identifiability among givers and recipients may be an effective way to achieve this goal.

中文翻译：

---

相互认同促进孩子的慷慨

从很小的时候起，孩子们就对彼此慷慨大方，但促进慷慨决策的情境特征仍在研究中。目前的研究测试了作为慷慨的接受者、给予者或两者兼而有之的可识别性对儿童慷慨的影响。六岁儿童 ( N  = 129) 在视频聊天范例中将资源分配给接收者。当孩子们和接受者都可以相互识别时（即，在相互认同的情况下）鉴别）。孩子们在匿名的情况下和在只有接受者或只有给予者才能被另一个孩子识别的“片面”情况下就不那么慷慨了。这些结果表明，相互认同是一种生态上有效的经验，能够识别并被一个慷慨行为的接受者识别，是儿童时期做出慷慨决策的一个特别有力的贡献者。此外，就增加儿童的慷慨程度是一个目标而言，这些结果表明，增加给予者和接受者之间的可识别性可能是实现这一目标的有效方法。