Giving pre-schoolers choice to sacrifice increases sharing behaviour

Washington, August 19 (ANI): Allowing kids to make a choice to sacrifice their own toys in order to share with someone else makes them share more in the future, a new study has claimed.



Previous research has shown that this idea - as described by the over-justification effect - explains why rewarding children for sharing can backfire. Children come to perceive themselves as people who don't like to share since they had to be rewarded for doing so. Because they don't view themselves as "sharers" they are less likely to share in the future.

Chernyak and Kushnir were interested in finding out whether freely chosen sacrifice might have the opposite effect on kids' willingness to share.

"Making difficult choices allows children to infer something important about themselves: In making choices that aren't necessarily easy, children might be able to infer their own prosociality."

To test this, the researchers introduced 3-5 year-old kids to Doggie, a puppet, who was feeling sad. Some of the children were given a difficult choice: Share a precious sticker with Doggie, or keep it for themselves.






Chernyak said that given the high amount of emphasis we place on choice during early childhood, especially in this culture, it is important to delineate specifically what choice might do - and not do - for young children.


Chernyak asserted that allowing children to make difficult choices may influence their sharing behavior by teaching them greater lessons about their abilities, preferences, and intentions towards others.

The new findings have been published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. (ANI)