Brain Mechanism Predicts Generosity in Children: How to Encourage Sharing

You may just be able to predict how generous your child will be by examining their brain. Neuroscientists have discovered specific brain markers that predict generosity in children and are linked to both social and moral evaluation processes.

While children tend to be natural helpers, their perspective on sharing resources tends to be selfish. That's why scientists decided to take a closer look at how young children's brains evaluate whether or not to share something with others.

In order to see how generosity is exhibited in the brain, the researchers recorded brain waves by EEG and tracked the eye movements of 57 children between the ages of three to five. While these recordings were taking place, the children were showed short animations depicting prosocial and antisocial behaviors of cartoon-like characters either helping or hurting each other. Then, the children were given ten stickers and told that the stickers were theirs to keep. They were then asked if they wanted to share any of their stickers with an anonymous child who was to come in the lab later that day.

"We know that generosity in children increases as they get older," said Jean Decety, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The results of this study demonstrate that children exhibit both distinct early automatic and later more controlled patterns of neural responses when viewing scenarios showing helping and harmful behaviors. It's that later more controlled neural response that is predictive of generosity."

The researchers found that the type of animation the children watched beforehand influenced the children's likelihood of behaving in a generous way. In addition, they found that there was no difference in sharing behavior by gender or age. The findings reveal how young children's brains process moral situations presented in these scenarios and the direct link to actual prosocial behavior in the act of generosity by sharing stickers. More specifically, it shows the specific neuro markers of implicit moral evaluations and moral behavior.

"These findings provide an interesting idea that by encouraging children to reflect upon the moral behavior of others, we may be able to foster sharing and generosity in them," said Decety.

The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

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