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Anyone who has spent time with toddlers knows that they don’t like to share toys very much. A curious experiment refutes the claim that young children are naturally selfish.
A group of psychologists led by Julia Ulber conducted a series of experiments demonstrating that even the youngest children are altruistic and willing to share with others. The authors note that previous studies have mostly shown that toddlers did not want to share things that originally belonged to them. The new study examined how they relate to items that do not belong to any of them.
The first experiment involved 48 pairs of babies aged 18 months to 2 years. Each couple sat at a table, in the center of which were four glass marbles in a small box. If the children took the ball and put it in a special music box next to it, it made a funny sound. The experiment was repeated four times for each pair.
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In most cases (44%), the kids shared the balloons equally, in 37% of cases they shared them dishonestly (one balloon for one, three for the second), and in 19% of cases, one of the children took all the balloons for himself. Everything happened quite calmly, the children rarely tried to steal balls from each other. In general, as the researchers note, very rarely one of the kids was left empty-handed, which is not consistent with the idea of undivided selfishness of children of this age.
The next experiment involved 128 pairs of two-year-olds, unlike the first experiment, none of them knew each other. The children sat at the table, and they were asked to get the balls to turn on the music box. Now, however, to get the ball, the child had to pull on a bar on their side of the table, and the ball would fall into a special tray where it could be retrieved. In one version of the experiment, there was only one pallet, in which case the children divided the marbles equally about half the time. When they needed to “cooperate” to get the marbles—pulling the bars at the same time—they were more likely to share honestly (60% of the time).
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In another version of the same experiment, each child had their own marble tray. Sometimes three balls fell to one child, and only one to another. In about a third of cases, the baby who got more voluntarily and on his own initiative gave one ball to the second child. The researchers note that only at this age can such behavior be observed, not earlier.
If the balloons were different colors (every two balloons were the same color as one of the children’s music box), the kids were even more willing to share them. Perhaps it seemed to them that if the marble was colored like a child’s music box, then it was his property, or that the colors simply helped children, who still had little to no counting skills, figure out how to fairly distribute the marbles.
According to the authors of the study, their experiments showed that “young children are not at all selfish, but quite capable of being generous” in the distribution of “resources” among themselves.
Подробнее см. J. Ulber et al. «How 18- and 24-month-old peers divide resources among themselves», Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 140, December 2015.