Five-year-olds might seem socially clueless, but they’re already busily manipulating their reputations so they seem like nicer people than they are, a new study has found.
Researchers from Yale University found that kindergarteners were more generous when they knew their actions would be seen.
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“Much like the patterns of charity we see in adults, donation tendencies in children appear to be driven by the amount of information available to others about their actions,” study leader Kristin Lyn Leimgruber said.
“For both adults and children, the more others know about their actions, the more likely they are to act generously.”
Leimgruber’s team gave a group of five-year-olds stickers and told them they could share them with one of their classmates.
Some of the children could see the child they were asked to share with, while others couldn’t.
The researchers found that the kids were far more likely to share if the other child could see them.
They were also more likely to hand over some of their stickers if they were stored in a transparent box, which would clearly show how generous they had been.
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Those whose stickers were hidden in an opaque box were more inclined to keep them all for themselves, as onlookers couldn’t tell how many they had given away.
The research is published in the current issue of the journal PLoS One.
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