My Experience of Doing Child Development Research in Samoa, China, and the US

Jinyi Zhang is a recent graduate who majored in Psychology. She was awarded a Spring 2017 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on altruism across cultures under Dr. Philippe Rochat.

When you see the word “research”, what pops up in your mind first? Is it dressing up in a white lab coat and goggles and painstakingly transferring tiny cells under a microscope? Or is it burying yourself in a pool of books and online sources, trying to figure out the unsolved mysteries of Maya?  For me, doing research means going to amazing countries and studying their cultures through quantitative behavioral research.

It all started during a summer study abroad program in 2016. I went to Samoa, a secluded island country in the heart of the Polynesian South Pacific, with two professors and a small group of students. Our goal for the trip was to study child development in the South Pacific and we had the freedom of designing our own study with the guidance of Dr. Rochat and Dr. Robbins. Through my reading of literatures before the trip, I became interested in the topic of inequity aversion, a tendency to prefer equality and dislike any forms of inequality. I also came across a very interesting paper discussing a phenomenon called “hyperaltruism” (Crokett et. al, 2014), the situation when people are more concerned about the suffering of others than the suffering of themselves and are more willing to pay to reduce others’ suffering than they would do for themselves. I was surprised to find that no research to date has investigated inequity aversion in sharing negative objects instead of resources. Such situations are very common in our daily life, from dividing tedious work to sharing loss or debt among a group. There was also a gap in the literature about “hyperaltruism” in children-how early in development will this phenomenon appear? I hypothesized that the development of inequity aversion and altruistic tendencies were related to each other and that culture and age played a significant role in shaping those social cognitive processes. To test my hypotheses, I developed three games to test inequity aversion in different aspects (sharing resources and sharing harm) as well as the emergence of “hyperaltruistic” tendency. In Samoa, we had the opportunity to go to local schools to test children. Each of us was given a Samoan native speaker to translate our games to the children. Some of my friends even learned enough Samoan in a few days to test children themselves! In the morning we went to school and worked hard on our research projects; in the afternoon, we went back to our host families to hang out with the children from the family or just simply sat on the beach enjoying the blessing of tropical sunshine, Pacific breeze, and the peaceful village life.

Happy time always goes so fast. Upon finishing the program, I went back to China, my home country, to reunite with my family and friends. But I also carried a big mission, which was to contact a summer camp in my city and ask for permission to conduct my study there. Luckily, the organizer of the camp was very supportive of my research, and she even assigned me three assistants to help me code and record my testing sessions! I was in the camp for three days, and I managed to test over 60 children there. It surely felt nice to be able to conduct research in my native language and witness first-hand the cultural difference in children’s response to the games.

During the Fall 2016 semester, I collected samples from the US. With the help of local schools and after-school programs, as well as the help from Emory Infant and Child Lab, I managed to test over 100 children in the US, which gave me a total sample size of 220 from all cultures. What came with the happiness of successful recruitment was the hardship of data analysis. Data analysis was the most challenging part of my research, and since my data was relatively complicated, it was hard to capture all the variables with common statistical tests. With the help of my mentors, we finally were able to unravel the data and our hypotheses. Some of our mean findings were: 1. Culture and age both were significant predictors of children’s behavior types (egalitarian, altruistic, spiteful, ambiguous) in the two sharing games. 2. Altruistic tendency increased with age. 3. According to the behavioral types observed in the two sharing games, American children were the most egalitarian, Chinese children were the most altruistic, Samoan children were the most ambiguous. 4. “hyperaltruism” were only observed in Chinese children over 8 years old, indicating the role of culture and age in constructing altruism.

The experience of doing cross-cultural research was eye-opening and full of fun (and challenges!). I have been a very involved member of the Emory community, but I would say that the year-long experience of conducting independent research as my honors thesis was the most rewarding thing that happened in my undergraduate career. I will continue my work after graduation with my mentors, and I hope to pursue a career in psychological research in the future.

Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.