By behaving altruistically, individuals voluntarily reduce their benefits in order to increase their partners'. This deviation from a self-interest-maximizing function may be cognitively demanding, though. This study investigates whether altruistic sharing in 4- to 6-year-old children, assessed by a dictator game (DG), is related to three measures of executive functioning, that is, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. We found that children who turned out to be altruistic in the DG performed better on an inhibition task than non-altruists did. This finding lends support to the hypothesis that altruistic sharing might be somewhat constrained by the child's ability to inhibit a natural tendency to preserve his or her own resources. Much research is needed to understand the role of inhibitory control in the development of costly sharing and the consolidation of inequity aversion.

Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same) and only later on in development evolving into more complex ones (e.g., equity: distributions match contributions). Here, we report 2 experiments with 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 195) that contradict this constructivist account. Our results demonstrate that children as young as 3 years old are able to take merit into account by distributing tokens according to individual contributions but that this ability may be hidden by a preference for equality.

Drawing from the literature in neuroeconomics, organizational justice, and social cognitive neuroscience, I propose a model of neuro-organizational justice that explores the role of the brain in how people form fairness judgments and react to situations of fairness and/or unfairness in organizations. The model integrates three levels of analysis: (a) behavioral, (b) mental (cognitive and emotional), and (c) neural. The behavioral level deals with motivated actions displayed by the individual; the mental level deals with information processing mechanisms and emotional arousal; and the neural level concerns the brain systems instantiating mental processes. The paper also describes a fairness theory of mind that could help managers improve their ability to create fair working environments. The model implications for further research and management practice are discussed.

Cooperative behavior depends in part on a preference for equitable outcomes. Recent research in behavioral economics assesses variables that influence adult concerns for equity, but few studies to date investigate the emergence of equitable behavior in children using similar economic games. We tested 288 3- to 6-year olds in an anonymous Dictator Game to assess how the value of the currency used affects equity preferences in children. To manipulate value, children played the game with their most or least favorite stickers. At all ages, we found a strong value effect with children donating more of their least favorite stickers than their favorite stickers. We also found a dramatic increase with age in the percentage of children who were prosocial (i.e. donated at least one sticker). However, children who were prosocial tended to give the same proportion of stickers at all ages about half of their least favorite stickers and 40% of their favorite stickers. These findings highlight the influence of resource value on children's preference for equity, and provide evidence for two different processes underlying altruistic giving: the decision to donate at all and the decision about how much to donate.

Recent research in developmental psychology shows that children understand several principles of fairness by 3 years of age, much earlier than previously believed. However, children's knowledge of fairness does not always align with their behavior, and immediate self-interest alone cannot explain this gap. In this forum paper, we consider two factors that influence the relation between fairness knowledge and behavior: relative advantage and how rewards are acquired.

Young children have long been known to act selfishly and gradually appear to become more generous across middle childhood. While this apparent change has been well documented, the underlying mechanisms supporting this remain unclear. The current study examined the role of early theory of mind and executive functioning in facilitating sharing in a large sample (N = 98) of preschoolers. Results reveal a curious relation between early false-belief understanding and sharing behavior. Contrary to many commonsense notions and predominant theories, competence in this ability is actually related to less sharing. Thus, the relation between developing theory of mind and sharing may not be as straightforward as it seems in preschool age children. It is precisely the children who can engage in theory of mind that decide to share less with others.

The construct of “empathy” embodies a number of characteristics necessary for psychological health in children. Surprisingly, most research has been based solely on children and adolescent report and observational measures despite evidence that multi-informant assessment is fundamental to the accurate measurement of such constructs. We present research documenting the development and validation of a brief parent-report measure of child empathy targeted at the formative years for the development of empathic skills, through to adolescence. The Griffith Empathy Measure, adapted from the Bryant Index of Empathy, showed convergence with child ratings, and good reliability and validity across gender and age. Consistent with theoretical accounts of empathy, it was found to include affective and cognitive components that showed divergent associations with other aspects of child functioning.

Empathy is the ability to experience and understand what others feel without confusion between oneself and others. Knowing what someone else is feeling plays a fundamental role in interpersonal interactions. In this paper, we articulate evidence from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and argue that empathy involves both emotion sharing (bottom-up information processing) and executive control to regulate and modulate this experience (top-down information processing), underpinned by specific and interacting neural systems. Furthermore, awareness of a distinction between the experiences of the self and others constitutes a crucial aspect of empathy. We discuss data from recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging studies with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others, and highlight the role of different neural mechanisms that underpin the experience of empathy, including emotion sharing, perspective taking, and emotion regulation.

Economic exchange often pits options for selfish and cooperative benefit against one another. Decisions favoring communal profit at the expense of self-interest have traditionally been thought to stem from strategic control aimed at tamping down emotional responses centered on immediate resource acquisition. In the present article, evidence is provided to argue against this limited view of the role played by emotion in shaping prosociality. Findings demonstrate that the social emotion gratitude functions to engender cooperative economic exchange even at the expense of greater individual financial gains. Using real-time inductions, increased gratitude is shown to directly mediate increased monetary giving within the context of an economic game, even where such giving increases communal profit at the expense of individual gains. Moreover, increased giving occurred regardless of whether the beneficiary was a known individual or complete stranger, thereby removing the possibility that it stemmed from simple awareness of reciprocity constraints.

Abstract Some of the most fundamental questions concerning our evolutionary origins, our social relations, and the organization of society are centred around issues of altruism and selfishness. Experimental evidence indicates that human altruism is a powerful force and is unique in the animal world. However, there is much individual heterogeneity and the interaction between altruists and selfish individuals is vital to human cooperation. Depending on the environment, a minority of altruists can force a majority of selfish individuals to cooperate or, conversely, a few egoists can induce a large number of altruists to defect. Current gene-based evolutionary theories cannot explain important patterns of human altruism, pointing towards the importance of both theories of cultural evolution as well as gene-culture co-evolution.

Abstract When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different--to pay it forward? In 5 experiments, participants received greedy, equal, or generous divisions of money or labor from an anonymous person and then divided additional resources with a new anonymous person. While equal treatment was paid forward in kind, greed was paid forward more than generosity. This asymmetry was driven by negative affect, such that a positive affect intervention disrupted the tendency to pay greed forward. Implications for models of generalized reciprocity are discussed.

How cooperation and altruism among non-relatives can persist in the face of cheating remains a key puzzle in evolutionary biology. Although mechanisms such as direct and indirect reciprocity and limited movement have been put forward to explain such cooperation, they cannot explain cooperation among unfamiliar, highly mobile individuals. Here we show that cooperation may be evolutionarily stable if decisions taken to cooperate and to change group membership are both dependent on anonymous social experience (generalized reciprocity). We find that a win-stay, lose-shift rule (where shifting is either moving away from the group or changing tactics within the group after receiving defection) evolves in evolutionary simulations when group leaving is moderately costly (i.e. the current payoff to being alone is low, but still higher than that in a mutually defecting group, and new groups are rarely encountered). This leads to the establishment of widespread cooperation in the population. If the costs of group leaving are reduced, a similar group-leaving rule evolves in association with cooperation in pairs and exploitation of larger anonymous groups. We emphasize that mechanisms of assortment within populations are often behavioural decisions and should not be considered independently of the evolution of cooperation.

Humans often forward kindness received from others to strangers, a phenomenon called the upstream or pay-it-forward indirect reciprocity. Some field observations and laboratory experiments found evidence of pay-it-forward reciprocity in which chains of cooperative acts persist in social dilemma situations. Theoretically, however, cooperation based on pay-it-forward reciprocity is not sustainable. We carried out laboratory experiments of a pay-it-forward indirect reciprocity game (i.e., chained gift-giving game) on a large scale in terms of group size and time. We found that cooperation consistent with pay-it-forward reciprocity occurred only in a first few decisions per participant and that cooperation originated from inherent pro-sociality of individuals. In contrast, the same groups of participants showed persisting chains of cooperation in a different indirect reciprocity game in which participants earned reputation by cooperating. Our experimental results suggest that pay-it-forward reciprocity is transient and disappears when a person makes decisions repeatedly, whereas the reputation-based reciprocity is stable in the same situation.

ABSTRACT In three experiments, respondents behavior conformed to the dictates of a relevant norm (the norm against littering) only under conditions of normative focus. This relationship held true across three types of procedures for producing normative focus (physiological arousal, modeling, and self-directed attention), across two types of settings (public and private), and across two types of norms (social and personal). Moreover, factors that would be expected to affect normative action were influential only when the norm was focal. These factors included the degree to which the action violated the relevant norm (Study 2) and the degree to which an individual subscribed to that norm (Study 3). Implications are discussed for developing campaigns to encourage prosocial behavior.

People across societies engage in costly sharing, but the extent of such sharing shows striking cultural variation, highlighting the importance of local norms in shaping generosity. Despite this acknowledged role for norms, it is unclear when they begin to exert their influence in development. Here we use a Dictator Game to investigate the extent to which 4- to 9-year-old children are sensitive to selfish (give 20%) and generous (give 80%) norms. Additionally, we varied whether children were told how much other children give ( descriptive norm ) or what they should give according to an adult ( injunctive norm ). Results showed that children generally gave more when they were exposed to a generous norm. However, patterns of compliance varied with age. Younger children were more likely to comply with the selfish norm, suggesting a licensing effect. By contrast, older children were more influenced by the generous norm, yet capped their donations at 50%, perhaps adhering to a pre-existing norm of equality. Children were not differentially influenced by descriptive or injunctive norms, suggesting a primacy of norm content over norm format. Together, our findings indicate that while generosity is malleable in children, normative information does not completely override pre-existing biases.

This study explored the criteria that children and adults use when evaluating the niceness of a character who is distributing resources. Four- and five-year-olds played the 'Giving Game', in which two puppets with different amounts of chips each gave some portion of these chips to the children. Adults played an analogous task that mimicked the situations presented to children in the Giving Game. For all groups of participants, we manipulated the absolute amount and proportion of chips given away. We found that children and adults used different cues to establish which puppet was nicer: 4-year-olds focused exclusively on absolute amount, 5-year-olds showed some sensitivity to proportion, and adults focused exclusively on proportion. These results are discussed in light of their implications for equity theory and for theories of the development of social evaluation.

Abstract The present study investigated the impact of preschoolers' anticipation of recipients' emotions on their resource allocation decisions. Three- to six-year-old children participated in one of three different scenarios before performing a resource allocation task. In the Other condition, children were led to think about another person's emotions when being shared with or not being shared with. In the Self condition, children were led to think about their own emotion when being shared with or not being shared with. In an epistemic control condition, children were asked to think about another person's knowledge state. The results showed that children were able to attribute different emotions to the respective recipient when being shared with or not being shared with. Children in the Other condition and the Self condition were more likely to allocate resources to the other when decisions were not associated with costs. Moreover, correlational analyses demonstrated that the more negatively children rated the emotion of the recipient when not being shared with the more they were to allocate resources to the recipient. This indicates that children's inclination to allocate resources to another person can be promoted by their awareness of a recipient's negative emotions when not being shared with.

Evolutionary theorists argue that cultural evolution has harnessed various aspects of our evolved psychology to create a variety of different mechanisms for sustaining social norms, including those related to large-scale cooperation. One of these mechanisms, costly punishment, has emerged in experiments as an effective means to sustain cooperation in some societies. If this view is correct, individuals' willingness to engage in the costly punishment of norm violators should be culturally transmittable, and applicable to both prosocial and anti-social behaviors (to any social norm). Since much existing work shows that norm-based prosocial behavior in experiments develops substantially during early and middle childhood, we tested 245 3- to 8-year olds in a simplified third party punishment game to investigate whether children would imitate a model's decision to punish, at a personal cost, both unequal and equal offers. Our study showed that children, regardless of their age, imitate the costly punishment of both equal and unequal offers, and the rates of imitation increase (not decrease) with age. However, only older children imitate not-punishing for both equal and unequal offers. These findings highlight the potential role of cultural transmission in the stabilization or de-stabilization of costly punishment in a population.

This study examined the relation between the acquisition of false-beliefs theory of mind (ToM) and reciprocity in preschoolers. Preschool-aged children completed a task assessing the understanding of false beliefs, and played an Ultimatum Game (UG) with another child in a face-to-face setting. Negative reciprocity was assessed by examining the rejection of unfair offers made by another child in the UG, while positive reciprocity was assessed by examining allocations made by participants in a Dictator Game (DG) following the UG. The results indicated that children who had passed a task assessing first-order false beliefs were more likely to make generous offers in a DG following a fair offer made by their partner in a proceeding UG, but that false beliefs ToM was unrelated to the rejection of unfair offers in the UG.

This paper presents an experimental investigation of strong indirect reciprocity. We examine both generalized indirect reciprocity (if A helps B then B helps C) and social indirect reciprocity (if A helps B then C helps A) in a setting where reciprocal behavior cannot be explained by strategic motivations, using a treatment for direct reciprocity as a benchmark. We use a variant of the strategy method to control for differences in first movers’ actions across treatments. We find evidence of strong reciprocity within each treatment, for both strategies and decisions. Generalized indirect reciprocity is found to be significantly stronger than social indirect reciprocity and, interestingly, than direct reciprocity. This finding is interpreted as reflecting the relevance of first movers’ motivation for second movers’ reciprocal behavior.

Children from preschool through second grade were told four stories and were asked questions about the stories that were designed to elicit their understanding of second order mental states. Found that 90% of kindergartners and 40% of preschoolers were able to attribute second order false beliefs. (BC)

Distributive justice is the core content of children’s moral development. Its development describes a child’s progressive understanding and application of what constitutes fairness during resource distribution. Previous work has suggested that younger children often allocate rewards in a self-interest centered manner as a result of limited cognitive abilities. However, recent studies have indicated that 3- to 5-year-old children could perform fair distribution, even infants hold the expectation of resource allocation according to one's effort. Incidentally, the dual-process theory emphasized that there are two different underlying processes of children’s distributive justice: the automatic emotional process and the controlled cognitive process. Given that children should first attribute others’ beliefs and intents, and hereafter take account of each person’s contributions through understanding and making use of high-level distributive justice principles, Theory of Mind (ToM) may participate an important role during this procedure. Based on current understandings, in order to get a clear overview of distributive justice development and its underlying mechanisms, this study aims in investigating how children’s Theory of Mind affect the two aspects of distributive justice (distributive justice judgment and distributive justice behavior) in the involved and uninvolved contexts. Experiment 1 focused on the relationship between Theory of Mind and children’s distributive justice judgment in two different contexts (involved and uninvolved). 61 preschool participants aged from 4- to 5- participated in the Giving Game and 40 adult participants completed the Giving Game Context Questionnaire. The results from the uninvolved context indicated that judgments made by children who passed the Theory of Mind tasks were similar to the judgments by the adults’, and both Theory of Mind and uninvolved context promoted children’s distributive justice judgment. Experiment 2 explored the question of how Theory of Mind affected children’s resource distributing behavior using distributive justice principles. This study compared the influence of Theory of Mind of 61 4- to 5-year-old children’s distributive justice behavior in the involved context, with the impact under uninvolved context. The results showed that there was an interaction between Theory of Mind and the involvement of distribution context. Under involved context, children who passed Theory of Mind tasks performed much more fairly than the children who didn't pass; whereas in uninvolved context there were no group differences. Together, these two experiments associated a link of how children would understand distributive justice principles, and how they could use in allocating resources. On the basis of the whole structure, Theory of Mind may have stable and context-sensitive impact on children’s distributive justice. This brought support to the dual-process theory, where automatic emotional process is dominant under involved context, while controlled cognitive process is guiding the uninvolved context. These results provided enriched evidence for current researches and brought new perspectives for future studies. Meanwhile, we can improve children’s development of distributive justice by strengthening their Theory of Mind abilities over training, which is valuable for educational purposes.

How do consumers decide how many units to buy? Whereas prior research on individual consumers' purchases has focused primarily on purchase incidence and brand choice, the authors focus on the psychological process behind the purchase quantity decision. The authors propose that a simple anchoring and adjustment model describes how consumers make purchase quantity decisions and suggests how point-of-purchase promotions can increase sales. Two field experiments and two lab studies show that anchor-based promotions-presented as multiple-unit prices, purchase quantity limits, and suggestive selling-can increase purchase quantities. The final study shows that consumers who retrieve internal anchors can counter these anchor-based promotions effectively. Firms might receive net benefits from anchor-based promotions depending on whether increases in unit sales reflect increased category consumption, brand switching, variety switching, store switching, or stockpiling.

Abstract Egalitarian behavior is considered to be a species-typical component of human cooperation. Human adults tend to share resources equally, even if they have the opportunity to keep a larger portion for themselves. Recent experiments have suggested that this tendency emerges fairly late in human ontogeny, not before 6 or 7 years of age. Here we show that 3-year-old children share mostly equally with a peer after they have worked together actively to obtain rewards in a collaboration task, even when those rewards could easily be monopolized. These findings contrast with previous findings from a similar experiment with chimpanzees, who tended to monopolize resources whenever they could. The potentially species-unique tendency of humans to share equally emerges early in ontogeny, perhaps originating in collaborative interactions among peers.

Contingent reciprocity is important in theories of the evolution of human cooperation, but it has been very little studied in ontogeny. We gave 2- and 3-year-old children the opportunity to either help or share with a partner after that partner either had or had not previously helped or shared with the children. Previous helping did not influence children’s helping. In contrast, previous sharing by the partner led to greater sharing in 3-year-olds but not in 2-year-olds. These results do not support theories claiming either that reciprocity is fundamental to the origins of children’s prosocial behavior or that it is irrelevant. Instead, they support an account in which children’s prosocial behavior emerges spontaneously but is later mediated by reciprocity.

Cooperation is a hallmark of human society. Humans often cooperate with strangers even if they will not meet each other again. This so-called indirect reciprocity enables large-scale cooperation among nonkin and can occur based on a reputation mechanism or as a succession of pay-it-forward behavior. Here, we provide the functional and anatomical neural evidence for two distinct mechanisms governing the two types of indirect reciprocity. Cooperation occurring as reputation-based reciprocity specifically recruited the precuneus, a region associated with self-centered cognition. During such cooperative behavior, the precuneus was functionally connected with the caudate, a region linking rewards to behavior. Furthermore, the precuneus of a cooperative subject had a strong resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) with the caudate and a large gray matter volume. In contrast, pay-it-forward reciprocity recruited the anterior insula (AI), a brain region associated with affective empathy. The AI was functionally connected with the caudate during cooperation occurring as pay-it-forward reciprocity, and its gray matter volume and rsFC with the caudate predicted the tendency of such cooperation. The revealed difference is consistent with the existing results of evolutionary game theory: although reputation-based indirect reciprocity robustly evolves as a self-interested behavior in theory, pay-it-forward indirect reciprocity does not on its own. The present study provides neural mechanisms underlying indirect reciprocity and suggests that pay-it-forward reciprocity may not occur as myopic profit maximization but elicit emotional rewards.

Research on theory of mind increasingly encompasses apparently contradictory findings. In particular, in initial studies, older preschoolers consistently passed false-belief tasks-a so-called "definitive" test of mental-state understanding-whereas younger children systematically erred. More recent studies, however, have found evidence of false-belief understanding in 3-year-olds or have demonstrated conditions that improve children's performance. A meta-analysis was conducted (N = 178 separate studies) to address the empirical inconsistencies and theoretical controversies. When organized into a systematic set of factors that vary across studies, false-belief results cluster systematically with the exception of only a few outliers. A combined model that included age, country of origin, and four task factors (e. g., whether the task objects were transformed in order to deceive the protagonist or not) yielded a multiple R of .74 and an R2 of .55; thus, the model accounts for 55% of the variance in false-belief performance. Moreover, false-belief performance showed a consistent developmental pattern, even across various countries and various task manipulations: preschoolers went from below-chance performance to above-chance performance. The findings are inconsistent with early competence proposals that claim that developmental changes are due to tasks artifacts, and thus disappear in simpler, revised false-belief tasks; and are, instead, consistent with theoretical accounts that propose that understanding of belief, and, relatedly, understanding of mind, exhibit genuine conceptual change in the preschool years.

This study aimed to explore the development of resource sharing in preschoolers and its relationship with children’s theory of mind (ToM) understanding. A total of 74 2- to 4-year-old Chinese children participated in three tasks with toys that could be shared with a puppet (animated by a female experimenter). In each sharing task, the puppet communicated her desire for children’s items with a series of progressively more explicit cues. Results showed that 2- and 3-year-olds relied on more explicit communicative cues to share resources with others, whereas 4-year-olds shared more spontaneously. In addition, children’s ToM understanding was positively correlated with their sharing behavior independent of their age. Specifically, children who had acquired the ability to understand that people could have different beliefs about the same thing and that people were ignorant if they had not seen the fact shared more spontaneously and shared more items with their playmate than children who had not acquired these two abilities. Findings suggest that preschoolers’ sharing behavior is enhanced by their ToM understanding and explicit communicative cues provided by the playmate.

Research has demonstrated that prosocial sharing is emotionally rewarding, which leads to further prosocial actions; such a positive feedback loop suggests a proximal mechanism of human’s tendency to act prosocially. However, it leaves open a question as to how the emotional benefits from sharing develop in young children and whether sharing under pressure promotes happiness as well. The current study directly compared 3- and 5-year-old Chinese children’s happiness when sharing was autonomous (the recipient did not contribute to getting the reward) with when sharing was obligated (the recipient and the actor jointly earned the reward). We found that children shared more items overall when sharing was obligated than autonomous, demonstrating their conformity to social norms of merit-based sharing. In children who eventually shared with others, 5-year-olds gave out more stickers in the obligated sharing condition than in the autonomous sharing condition, but 3-year-olds shared the same amount between the conditions, suggesting that 5-year-olds adhered to the merit-based sharing norm more strictly than 3-year-olds. Moreover, in the autonomous sharing condition, children displayed greater happiness when they shared with the recipient than when they kept stickers for themselves, suggesting that costly prosocial giving benefited children with positive mood; however, children did not gain happiness when they shared with the recipient in the obligated sharing condition. These findings demonstrate that children’s affective benefits depend on the motivation underlying their prosocial behavior, and further imply that normative force and emotional gains may independently drive preschoolers’ prosocial behaviors.

Fairness or justice as the eternal pursuit of human beings is an important topic shared by psychology,economics and many other disciplines.Method of story is often used by developmental psychologists to explore children's reasoning about distributive fairness.The introduction of game theoretical paradigm provides a new approach and perspective to study children's fair behavior.The paper mainly reviewed children's development of fair behavior in experimental games and the reasons for the contradictory age trends was analyzed.The in-group bias in fair behavior,the nature of fair behavior:outcomes versus intentions and the relationship between theory of mind and children's fair behavior were discussed.Finally,the paper suggested that future research on children's fair behavior must keep the social context in mind as well as children's social cognitive abilities.

Fairness or justice as the eternal pursuit of human beings is an important topic shared by psychology, economics and many other disciplines. Method of story is often used by developmental psychologists to explore children’s reasoning about distributive fairness. The introduction of game theoretical paradigm provides a new approach and perspective to study children’s fair behavior. The paper mainly reviewed children’s development of fair behavior in experimental games and the reasons for the contradictory age trends was analyzed. The in-group bias in fair behavior, the nature of fair behavior: outcomes versus intentions and the relationship between theory of mind and children’s fair behavior were discussed. Finally, the paper suggested that future research on children’s fair behavior must keep the social context in mind as well as children’s social cognitive abilities.

Once people became victims of others' selfishness, they would be more likely to treat another innocent person selfishly. That is considered as paying the selfishness forward, namely the effect of selfishness transmission. Descriptive norm and psychological entitlement can account for the mechanism of selfishness transmission. Meanwhile, some personal and situational factors, such as justice sensitivity, moral identity, moral salience, as well as anonymity, may moderate this process. Previous studies have focused on how the victims would punish and retaliate against the selfish person who hurt them, but little is known about how victims would treat the third innocent person. Future researches should discuss the effect of cognitive factors(e.g. general trust, moral judgment), as well as the influence of emotions and empathy in selfishness transmission.

Objectives: The Griffith Empathy Measure (GEM) is a self-report measure of empathy. The current study aimed to explore the reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the GEM. It also aimed to compare individuals with and without schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) features on various components of empathy. Methods: 420 college students from Beijing and 526 college students from Guangzhou completed a set of questionnaires that measured empathy and schizotypal personality disorder traits. Cronbach's coefficient alpha was used to evaluate the internal consistency of the GEM. Construct validity was evaluated using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (EFA and CFA). Construct validity was also examined by looking at the relationship between the GEM and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). Finally, the sensitivity of the GEM was evaluated by comparing the total and factor GEM scores between individuals with and without SPD traits. Results: The Chinese GEM showed good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.83). Results of an exploratory factor analysis suggested a three-factor model consisting of cognitive, affective and behavioural empathy components. Results of a confirmatory factor analysis showed that the three-factor model, as well as the two-factor model found in the English version, were both acceptable. Construct validity (specifically convergent validity) was also corroborated by significant correlations between the IRI subscales and GEM (personal distress: r = .09, p > .05; perspective taking: r = .34, p r = .44, p r = .51, p t(1,250) = 1.99, p = .05), thus confirming discriminative validity. Conclusions: These preliminary findings suggest that the Chinese version of the GEM demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency and construct validity. In addition, the findings suggest that the GEM is culturally appropriate and researchers can use it to study empathy in healthy and clinical Chinese participants.