Researchers from Cornell University found that when children are given a choice on whether or not to sacrifice their toys and goodies, they tend to share these items more with other children.
Getting small kids to share their toys and goodies with other kids can be a tedious task. However, researchers from Cornell University found that children that were given a choice on whether to make this sacrifice or not showed increased sharing behavior. Researchers noted that when children find themselves making a sacrifice after making a difficult choice, they tend to see themselves in a more beneficent light.
For the study, a group of 3 to 5 year old children were introduced to a sad puppet named Doggie. All the participants were then divided into three groups. The first group was given a difficult choice to make. These children were told to either share their stickers with Doggie or keep all the stickers for themselves. The second group was given the choice of either sharing the stickers or putting them away. The third group was forced to share its stickers with Doggie.
Next, all the children were introduced to another puppet named Ellie and were given an option of how many stickers they wanted to share with Ellie. Researchers observed that children belonging to the first group shared far more stickers with Ellie than the children belonging to the other two groups.
"You might imagine that making difficult, costly choices is taxing for young children or even that once children share, they don't feel the need to do so again," psychological scientists Nadia Chernyak explained in a press release. "But this wasn't the case: Once children made a difficult decision to give up something for someone else, they were more generous, not less, later on."
A similar experiment showed that children who initially agreed to share more valuable items like frogs than invaluable ones like ripped pieces of paper with Doggie also shared more stickers with Ellie.
"Children are frequently taught to share, be polite, and be kind to others. In order to bring us closer to one day figuring out how to best teach children these skills, it is important to figure out which factors may aid in young children's sharing behavior," Chernyak concluded. "Allowing children to make difficult choices may influence their sharing behavior by teaching them greater lessons about their abilities, preferences, and intentions towards others."
