Poster #129 - Better to give than to receive?: 5-year-olds mistakenly believe they are happier from receiving

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

A growing body of work suggests that engaging in generous actions is self-rewarding for adults. Adults experience greater happiness from helping or sharing with others (Aknin, Barrington-Leigh, et al., 2013; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon & Schekade, 2005). Moreover, the positive emotions adults experience from being generous are even greater than those from receiving something for themselves (Dunn, Aknin & Norton, 2008). However, adults do not readily recognize this phenomenon—they tend to believe that they would be happier from receiving something for themselves (Dunn et al., 2008). Since adults are less generous when provided time to deliberate on their decisions (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012), it is possible that this mistaken belief undermines their generous motivation.
Initial work suggests that children experience happiness from giving quite early in development (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012). By five years of age, children, on average, recognize that giving makes them happy and this belief is correlated with children’s own generosity (Paulus & Moore, 2016). However, no work to date has examined if children believe giving resources to others is less emotionally rewarding than receiving them—a belief that could undermine their motivation to give. The current work examines whether 5-year-olds experience greater happiness after giving than after receiving resources (Study 1) and whether children believe giving resources is more or less emotionally rewarding than receiving them (Study 2).
In Study 1, 48 5-year-olds gave resources to another child and got resources from an experimenter (in a counterbalanced order). Participants’ emotion expressions were coded during two experimental phases—after giving and after receiving. The analyses revealed that participants were significantly happier after giving resources to others than after receiving resources for themselves, F(1,46)=47.30, p<.001, and importantly, there was not a significant interaction with counterbalance order, p=.610.
In Study 2, 52 5-year-olds listened to stories about other children giving and receiving resources as well as hypothetical stories about themselves giving and receiving resources (in counterbalanced orders). Participants were asked to rate others’ and their own emotions, respectively. Participants believed that both other people, t(51)=13.30, p<.001, and themselves, t(47)=3.48, p=.001, will feel significantly happier after receiving resources than after giving resources. Although children believed they would feel happier from receiving resources, they did tend to believe they would be happy after giving (giving condition mean compared to neutral emotion: t(51)=4.31, p<.001).
In conclusion, by age five children have developed similar mistaken beliefs as demonstrated by adults—they believe it is more rewarding to receive (Study 2) even though they experience greater emotional reward from giving (Study 1). Therefore, it is likely that emotional reward operates as an implicit (rather than explicit) motivation for generous behavior. Although children did believe people are happy from giving, their belief that it is better to receive could potentially undermine their motivation to give in situations where they are provided with time to deliberate prior to their decision. Whether children are more generous when they do not have time to deliberate is an important question for future research.

Authors

• Anne Fast, Western Washington University
  Presenting Author

• Sanjana Ravi, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristina Olson, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author