Neuroscience
Anecdotally, anyone who's spent time around toddlers knows that they mostly don't like sharing their toys. Together with research showing that toddlers, like adults, get pretty attached to their things and are reluctant to give them up, this has led to a popular belief that toddlers are selfish by nature.
But a team of developmental psychologists led by Julia Ulber has published new evidence in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology that paints a more heart-warming picture. These psychologists point out that most past research has focused on how much toddlers share things that are already theirs. The new study looks instead at how much they share new things that previously no one owned. In such scenarios, toddlers frequently show admirable generosity and fairness.
There were two main experiments. The first involved 48 pairs of 18-month-old or 24-month-old toddlers sitting together at table, in the middle of which was a small container containing four marbles. If the toddlers took a marble and placed it in a nearby jingle box, it made a fun noise. The point of the set-up (repeated four times for each toddler pairing) was to see how the pairs of toddlers would divvy up the marbles between them.
Most of the time (44 per cent) the toddlers divided the marbles up fairly, 37 per cent of the time unequally (i.e. one child took 3 marbles), and 19 per cent of the time one child took all the marbles. This all took place pretty calmly, with marble steals happening only rarely. Overall, the experiment "rarely left one peer empty-handed," the researchers said, "and thus [the results] do not match the picture of the selfish toddler."
In a follow-up experiment with 128 pairs of two-year-olds, the set-up was more complex and this time, unlike the first experiment, none of the toddlers knew each other. Again, the children sat at opposite sides of a table with marbles on offer, but this time they had to pull a board sticking out of their side of the table to get the marbles to roll down into a reachable tray (marbles could again be used to make a jingle box play music). When the apparatus was designed so that there was one shared tray between the two toddlers, the toddlers shared the marbles equally about half the time. And this rose to 60 per cent if they'd had to collaborate by pulling the boards together to release the marbles.
In another variation of the set-up – possibly the most illuminating – the children had separate trays, and sometimes the researchers made it so that one child received three marbles in their tray and the other child just one. On about one third of these occasions, the results were delightful – the "lucky child" with three marbles gave up one of their marbles to their partner, willingly and unprompted. "This is the youngest age ever observed at which young children make sacrifices in order to equalise resources," the researchers said.
These acts of fairness were greater when the marbles were colour-coded so that two marbles matched the colour of one child's jingle box (located behind them) and the other two matched the other child's. This colour-coding effect on generosity might be due to the children interpreting the colours as a sign of ownership (i.e. the idea being that this or that marble belongs to the other child because it matches their jingle box), or the colours might simply have helped the children, with their limited numerical skills, to identify a fair split in the numbers of marbles.
The researchers said their results showed that "young children are not selfish, but instead rather generous" when they're sharing resources among themselves, and that more research is needed to establish "in more detail the prosocial or other motives that influence the way in which young children divide resources."
_________________________________
Ulber, J., Hamann, K., & Tomasello, M. (2015). How 18- and 24-month-old peers divide resources among themselves Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 140, 228-244 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2015.07.009
--further reading--
Comparing children's sharing tendencies across diverse human societies
How to increase altruism in toddlers
Most acts of aggression by toddlers are unprovoked
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Our free fortnightly email will keep you up-to-date with all the psychology research we digest: Sign up!
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Neuroscience
Toddlers have an instinct for fairness and generosity
But a team of developmental psychologists led by Julia Ulber has published new evidence in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology that paints a more heart-warming picture. These psychologists point out that most past research has focused on how much toddlers share things that are already theirs. The new study looks instead at how much they share new things that previously no one owned. In such scenarios, toddlers frequently show admirable generosity and fairness.
There were two main experiments. The first involved 48 pairs of 18-month-old or 24-month-old toddlers sitting together at table, in the middle of which was a small container containing four marbles. If the toddlers took a marble and placed it in a nearby jingle box, it made a fun noise. The point of the set-up (repeated four times for each toddler pairing) was to see how the pairs of toddlers would divvy up the marbles between them.
Most of the time (44 per cent) the toddlers divided the marbles up fairly, 37 per cent of the time unequally (i.e. one child took 3 marbles), and 19 per cent of the time one child took all the marbles. This all took place pretty calmly, with marble steals happening only rarely. Overall, the experiment "rarely left one peer empty-handed," the researchers said, "and thus [the results] do not match the picture of the selfish toddler."
In a follow-up experiment with 128 pairs of two-year-olds, the set-up was more complex and this time, unlike the first experiment, none of the toddlers knew each other. Again, the children sat at opposite sides of a table with marbles on offer, but this time they had to pull a board sticking out of their side of the table to get the marbles to roll down into a reachable tray (marbles could again be used to make a jingle box play music). When the apparatus was designed so that there was one shared tray between the two toddlers, the toddlers shared the marbles equally about half the time. And this rose to 60 per cent if they'd had to collaborate by pulling the boards together to release the marbles.
In another variation of the set-up – possibly the most illuminating – the children had separate trays, and sometimes the researchers made it so that one child received three marbles in their tray and the other child just one. On about one third of these occasions, the results were delightful – the "lucky child" with three marbles gave up one of their marbles to their partner, willingly and unprompted. "This is the youngest age ever observed at which young children make sacrifices in order to equalise resources," the researchers said.
These acts of fairness were greater when the marbles were colour-coded so that two marbles matched the colour of one child's jingle box (located behind them) and the other two matched the other child's. This colour-coding effect on generosity might be due to the children interpreting the colours as a sign of ownership (i.e. the idea being that this or that marble belongs to the other child because it matches their jingle box), or the colours might simply have helped the children, with their limited numerical skills, to identify a fair split in the numbers of marbles.
The researchers said their results showed that "young children are not selfish, but instead rather generous" when they're sharing resources among themselves, and that more research is needed to establish "in more detail the prosocial or other motives that influence the way in which young children divide resources."
_________________________________
Ulber, J., Hamann, K., & Tomasello, M. (2015). How 18- and 24-month-old peers divide resources among themselves Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 140, 228-244 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2015.07.009
--further reading--
Comparing children's sharing tendencies across diverse human societies
How to increase altruism in toddlers
Most acts of aggression by toddlers are unprovoked
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Our free fortnightly email will keep you up-to-date with all the psychology research we digest: Sign up!
- Psychologists Have Devised A Test For Measuring One-year-olds' Creativity
The study found that creative parents tended to have creative toddlersA team of psychologists in England say they've developed a reliable way to measure divergent thinking in one-year-old infants. Divergent thinking is a form of creativity that involves...
- Most Acts Of Aggression By Toddlers Are Unprovoked
Watching toddlers pinch, hit and bite each other doesn't fill you with confidence about human nature. But there's no need to be down about it – the little devils don't yet have the self-control to manage their anger and frustration, that's...
- Reading To Babies Gives Them A Head-start
Toddlers read to daily by their mothers from an early age have bigger vocabularies and superior cognitive skills. Helen Raikes and colleagues asked 2,581 mothers from poor families enrolled on the Early Head Start programme in America how often they read...
- People Are Better Teachers Than Teletubbies
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