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SALT LAKE CITY — Young children know sharing is important, but get greedy when it is their turn to do the sharing, according to a new study.
Children as young as 3 understand the concept of fairness — meaning that each child should get an equal amount of stickers or pieces of candy. But when that same child who understands the importance of fairness is put in charge of divvying up the goods, the scales generally tip in his or her favor.
Researchers from Boston and Harvard universities and the University of Michigan gave children four stickers each that would be desirable to the individual children. The children, ranging in age from 3 to 8, were told the stickers belonged to them.
The children were then asked to share the stickers with another boy or girl. They were also asked how many stickers another boy or girl should share.
Regardless of age, children agreed the stickers should be split evenly. But children ages 3 to 6 were more likely to keep more stickers for themselves.
Based on impulse-control tests performed on the children, the reaction was not simply a matter of lack of inhibition, according to the researchers.
When researchers spoke with the children about why they shared stickers, the response in the 3- to 4-year-old age group was far more likely to include responses about desire, compared the the older age groups, which valued fairness.
In a second experiment, the children were asked to simply imagine how many stickers they would give another child. The 3- and 4-year-olds were far more likely to predict hoarding the stickers, despite having acknowledged that the stickers should be split evenly.
"They were surprisingly honest and self-aware. They said, ‘I realize I would keep more for myself,' " Peter Blake, a co-author of the study, told the Boston Globe.
Blake and his team hope future studies will help them understand the cognitive processes of young children that lead to the dissonance between what they understand and how they act.
The study was published Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE.
