We tend to think of children as selfish creatures. Parents talk about the importance of teaching
their kids to share and to play well with others. Yet, the human species needs to be
cooperative to survive. Individually, humans are rather weak creatures, but
because of our collective ability to share our experiences and to teach each
other, we have come to dominate the planet.
So, is sharing and cooperation something that needs to be
taught?
This question has been explored by many researchers. For example, Mike Tomasello and his
colleagues demonstrate that even young children tend to share, to cooperate in
pursuing shared goals, and to want to punish people who harm others.
A fascinating paper by Nadia Chernyak and Tamar Kushnir in
the October, 2013 issue of Psychological Science explores a related question: can children adopt a mindset to share with
others? They suggest that if children
are given the choice to share with someone else, then that can create a more
lasting state of mind that leads them to continue sharing.
In one study, 3- and 4-year-old children were introduced to
a puppet dog and were told that the dog was sad. One group was told to give the dog a sticker
to make him feel better. A second group
was given a choice to either give the dog a sticker or to put the sticker in
the trash. For this group, the choice
was not personally costly. A third group
made a costly choice. They could either give the sticker to the dog to make it
happy or keep it for themselves. Kids of
this age love stickers, so giving up the sticker would come at a personal
cost. After making this choice, the
children were introduced to a puppet elephant who was also sad and were given
some more stickers. They could either
keep the stickers or give them to the elephant to make her happy. The key question was whether children would
keep the last set of stickers or give them away.
In all conditions, there was a tendency for the children to
give the sticker to the dog. Even the
children who had to make the costly choice between keeping the sticker or
giving it to the dog tended to give the sticker away to make the dog
happy.
The children who had no choice and those who chose to give
the sticker to the dog rather than throwing it away were not that generous to
the elephant. Only about 20% of these
children tended to give the stickers to the sad elephant rather than keeping
them. In contrast, about 70% of the
children who had to make the difficult choice in the first part of the study
also gave the stickers away to the sad elephant. This finding suggests that children adopted a
mindset of sharing when they had to make a difficult choice.
A few other studies in this paper helped to clarify this
effect.
In one study, children were either given the chance to play
with a sticker immediately or to make the difficult choice to save the sticker
until a later time. Children find it
hard to delay gratification, though most children in this study did put the sticker
away to play with later. Afterward, the
children were given the chance to give stickers to a sad elephant or keep the
stickers. Most children in this
condition chose to keep the stickers, suggesting that just making a difficult
choice is not enough to create a sharing mindset.
One final study had two groups. Each group had an opportunity to keep an item
or give it to the puppet dog to make it happy.
One group had an easy choice.
They either kept or gave away a small scrap of paper. The other group had a difficult choice, they
either kept or gave away a toy frog.
Afterward, both groups had the chance to give stickers to a sad
elephant.
Again, most children chose to make the dog happy by giving
up the object. The children who made the
hard choice, though, were much more likely to give their stickers to the sad
elephant than those who made the easy choice.
Putting all of this together, children do have a tendency to
want to keep things for themselves rather than to give them away. Most of the children in this study kept the
stickers for themselves rather than giving them away to make a puppet
happy. However, getting children to make
a hard choice promoted a sharing mindset.
When children actively chose to give something valuable to someone else,
they continued that behavior later in the study.
This finding is consistent with work on adults suggesting
that giving things away tends to make people happy. For example, a study published in Science by Elizabeth Dunn, Lara
Aknin, and Michael Norton suggests that when people give money to others, it
increases their happiness. One
possibility is that by giving stickers away in this study, children are also
learning that giving things to others has its own rewards. Future work will have to explore what
children learn from these difficult choices that promotes sharing.
