Preschoolers’ Selfish Sharing Is Reduced by Prior Experience With Proportional Generosity

Young children make sophisticated social and normative inferences based on proportional reasoning. We explored the possibility that proportional cues also help children learn from and about their own generosity. Across two experiments, 3- to 4-year-olds had the opportunity to give either 1 of 4, 1 of 3, 1 of 2, or 1 of 1 of their resources to an individual in need. We then measured children’s subsequent prosociality by looking at sharing behavior with a new individual. The more proportionally generous the initial action, the less likely children were to share selfishly in the second phase. Our results suggest that children make sense of their own actions using proportional cues and that giving children experience with difficult, prosocial actions increases the likelihood of their recurrence.