How many times a day do you have the ‘sharing is caring’ conversation with your smallies?
Trying to explain altruistic behaviour to children can be a challenge, especially when they realise sharing can come at a personal cost. But, it turns out that sharing makes our human brains happy. And because we feel happy, we want to share more, explaining why psychologists consistently find that people like to give more than they like to receive. Children, however, are often forced to share by the grownups around them, so do they still enjoy the emotional benefits of sharing even when it is not exactly voluntary?
Dr Zhen Wu and her colleagues examined this question in a group of preschool children in China, and reported their findings in Frontiers in Psychology. This study is especially intriguing since little ones are often encouraged to share, but very little is known about whether they benefit emotionally from such sharing.
In this study, Wu and colleagues compared positive facial expressions (as a measure of happiness) in three and five-year-old children who performed a sharing task, which consisted of sharing stickers with their peers. The experiment was set up such that the children were in two sharing groups: one group that shared voluntarily, and the other because they felt obligated to do so.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, both three and five year olds shared more when they were obligated to share than when it was voluntary. However, such obligated sharing did not make them happy. Interestingly, both three and five-year-olds showed greater happiness when they gave stickers away voluntarily, than when they kept them for themselves. “So, it seems that the motivation to give does count,” explains Dr Wu, “and it also suggests that it is unrealistic to expect a very young child to share under pressure and be happy about it!”
These findings provide fascinating insights into the psychology of preschool age children, and the first evidence that sharing under social norms is less emotionally rewarding than sharing voluntarily. Dr Wu suggests that preschool teachers and parents might use these findings to guide how they foster sharing in their students.
But the study is not without its drawbacks, cautions Dr Wu:
“It is difficult to entirely rule out the influence of social norms even in ‘voluntary’ giving mode. The giver might have felt pressure to give even when told they were not obliged to. We need to examine how an act of generosity leads to happiness that in turn prompts another act of giving.”
So sharing really is caring, but no good deed goes unpunished, eh?
