Museum of Science, Boston

Reasoning about Social Situations

Learning to navigate social situations is an important part of growing up. Some cognitive scientists study children in order to develop a better sense of how children perceive other people and how this might affect their social interactions.

Generosity

What leads to generous and selfish behaviors in children?

Young children know that sharing is better than selfishness, yet they often have a hard time allocating resources fairly. This study examines some of the factors that may lead to this gap between thinking and motivation.

In this study, children are given an even number of stickers and randomly assigned to be (a) an Experiencer, who is asked to allocate the stickers between the self and another child, or (b) a Forecaster, who is simply asked how he or she would divide them up with another child. These two conditions will help us compare what children say with what children actually do. We are also interested in how children think and feel about sharing. Thus, each child is asked about the rationale for his or her sharing decision, and about the feelings that go along with their decision.

It may be that children know that sharing is best, but the impulse is to get as much of something as possible. Therefore, your child will play two impulse-control games in which they must do something that runs counter to what they would tend to do (i.e. say “day” when they see a picture of night). This allows us test for links between children’s impulsivity and sharing behavior.

We predict that children who associate guilt with not sharing will be more likely to share. Further, we predict that the link between sharing behavior and age will be partially explained by children’s increasing capacity to manage impulses. We hope that this research will help parents understand generosity in childhood.


Other Resources

View a video of Craig Smith discussing related research.

Read about research that examines: What does "I'm sorry" mean to young children and How do apologies affect children’s feelings and behavior? .

Learn about other research related to Reasoning about Social Situations.

This research is conducted by the Paul Harris Lab at Harvard University

Try it at the Museum

Impulse Control

Play with the Magneatos ball and stick magnets on the second floor of the Discovery Center.

Tell your child that today the blue balls are called “red” and the red balls are called “blue”. Ask them to hand you a “red” ball. What color ball does your child hand you?

Sharing Pollen

Play with the nectar packets at the beehive. First, ask your child to distribute the packets between the two flowers. Does your child split them evenly? If not, can they explain why?

Next, take the packets out of the flowers and put them in one pile. Ask your child to split them into two piles so that another child can play too. Does your child split the packets evenly?

Try it at Home

Sharing Foods

Give your child an even number of crackers or cookies and ask them how they would share with you if they had too.

Later, perform the same task, but ask them to actually give you the amount they want to share. Do they share the same amount they said they would the first time?