Young children are willing to help others in distress unless it comes at a personal cost, new research into the ability of children to show compassion suggests.
A study analysing the behaviour of 285 four- and five-year-olds has found that children responded less compassionately to others when a personal reward was at stake.
“Compassion is about noticing suffering and then trying to do something to reduce the suffering as best you can,” said the study’s lead author, Dr James Kirby, a senior lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Queensland.
Previous research has shown that children are pro-social and “have a general tendency to want to help wherever they can”, Kirby said.
The researchers asked the youngsters to complete a puzzle game, for which they would receive a sticker as a reward. The children played alongside puppets or adults, who were deliberately given inadequate puzzle pieces to complete the task within a time frame.
The puppet or adult expressed distress three times, with increasing emotional intensity, that they were unable to finish the puzzle and receive a sticker. This gave a child multiple opportunities to share their own pieces.
“Across all of the studies we did, whenever they had extra resources, the children always help,” Kirby said. “But when you just give the child enough pieces for them to complete it themselves, that’s when they don’t [help others].
“When they didn’t help, they would try to console the puppet’s distress, by saying things like ‘it’s OK’ or ‘maybe next time’, but of course when you do the next task they didn’t help again.”
The scientists varied the conditions to see what might increase the likelihood of the child giving up a puzzle piece and forgoing the sticker reward.
This included explicitly suggesting that the child could share pieces, and also emphasising that the child and puppet (or adult) were on the same team, with same-coloured capes – all without success.
Children were only more likely to forgo one of their puzzle pieces if they had already been given a sticker upon immediately completing the task, and hence would not lose their reward.
“For young children, personal cost appears to be a greater inhibitor to compassionate responding than who compassion is directed toward,” the study found.
The researchers focused on kids aged four to five because around that time children start to develop theory of mind – the capacity to understand that other people have different thoughts and emotions.
“One of the aspects of compassion is you’ve got to have a sense that the other person could be experiencing something different to you in their mind, and you can start to try to work out what that might be so that you can help,” Kirby said.
But the findings of the study suggest that it is common for kids aged four to five not to sacrifice their own rewards.
“At that age, their brain is still going through a huge rate of maturational growth,” Kirby said.
“We can inadvertently set up environments which turn off helping behaviour. Environments where rewards can be won for certain tasks and there’s only a limited number of rewards going around – what you’re setting up is a competitive mindset.”
The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
