Análise do comportamento de escolha e impulsividade através do Jogo da Partilha e do Jogo do Desconto Temporal em crianças e adolescentes

Abstract

Economic games have been useful as experimental models for situations of complex social interaction. Psychologists interested in the phenomenon of generosity have used economic games to study decision-making processes and resource distribution. One of these games is the Sharing Game and research has analyzed the effects of some variables on how people allocate resources, such as distributor gender, magnitude of reinforcer, and impulsiveness. The present work intends to evaluate if and to what extent distribution strategies in the Sharing Game are affected by the contextual variables of distributor's gender and amount of money. In an single subject design, two experiments involving repeated trials were made with ten opportunities in which participants between 10 and 14 years old made choices to distribute the resources among themselves and a passive participant. Participants could choose optimally, competitively, egalitarian or altruistic. Before that, the Delay Discounting Game was carried out to analyze the impulsiveness of the participants' choices in the allocation of resources. The study also allowed for intersubject comparisons regarding the gender of participants. These games are important because they allow for: analyzing the contingencies involved in people's decisionmaking, characterizing the choices as ideal, fair or competitive, and bringing scrutiny into consideration of the possible effects of other variables (eg., gender, monetary incentive, money, information, etc.) on the distributions of people's choices, to determine whether these choices are stable or influenced by these variables.