Who Makes the Choice? The Influence of Choice on preschoolers’ Sharing Behaviors and Feelings

Abstract: The development of prosocial behaviors (e.g., helping, sharing) is an important part of children’s moral development. Previous research has indicated that the freedom to make choices (whether children make choices for themselves or other people make choices for them) has an important impact on children’s prosocial motivation and behaviors. However, little research has investigated the impact of the relatedness between the child and the adult who makes the choices, or the provision of reasonable explanations on children’s prosocial behaviors. Therefore, across two studies, we investigated how, one, the freedom to make choices, two, the relatedness between children and the adults who make choices for them, and/or three, the provision of reasonable explanations for those choices, may influence children’s prosocial motivation and behaviors. We conducted both studies with children aged 4–5 in China. In Study 1, children were asked to make decisions about sharing stickers with a puppet. They were randomly assigned to one of three choice conditions: self–choice, mother–choice, and experimenter–choice. In the self–choice condition, the child could decide for themselves whether to share with a puppet or not; in the mother–choice condition, the child’s mother instructed the child to share, and in the experimenter–choice condition, the experimenter instructed the child to share. After this, we measured children’s feelings during the sharing task, and their sharing behaviors towards a novel partner. Meanwhile, mothers in the self–choice and the mother–choice conditions completed a questionnaire measuring child–mother relatedness. We found that although there was no overall significant difference in children’s sharing behaviors or feelings across the three conditions, mother-child relatedness significantly moderated the effect of choice condition on children’s sharing feelings. Children who had positive relationships with their mothers demonstrated positive feelings when their mothers made the choice for them, similar to when they made the choice themselves. However, those who had neutral or negative relationships with their mothers, demonstrated worse feelings when their mothers made the choice for them compared to when they made the choice themselves. In Study 2, we employed similar methods, but used the following three conditions: the self–choice condition, the mother reasonable–choice condition (where the mother provided a reasonable explanation for the choice) and the mother unreasonable–choice condition (where the mother forced the child to share without providing a reason). We found that, when sharing with the first puppet, children were significantly more likely to share in the mother reasonable–choice and mother unreasonable–choice conditions than in the self–choice condition. However, when sharing with a new puppet, children in the mother reasonable–choice condition shared more stickers than those in the self–choice condition or the mother unreasonable–choice condition. Taken together, these two studies show that children’s prosocial motivations do not necessarily decrease when others make choices for them. Instead, for children positively connected with their mothers, following their mother’s choices can lead to positive feelings to a similar degree as those experienced when making choices themselves. Additionally, mothers’ reasonable choices and guidance can facilitate subsequent sharing behaviors. The findings of this study have significant implications about the development of preschoolers' prosocial motivation.