What is generosity? Intuitively, we know when an act is generous, and when it’s not. But try to nail down the boundaries of generosity, and things get slippery. Just ask Peter Blake, an associate professor of psychology at Boston University, who has been studying generosity in children for more than a decade. Even he struggles to define it.
“No one really seems to agree on what it means to be generous, and this is even among researchers,” Blake says. It’s one of the reasons he and a team of experts have spent the last two years analyzing the results of 45 experiments involving more than 4,000 children aged three to 12 years old, with an aim to better understand the phenomenon, and to develop a common definition to aid future research.
A striking theme Blake had already observed first-hand has been how often children will give away up to half of what they’re given—and how rarely they’ll give more.
“The pattern that we see across those older studies, and even newer ones, is that when people are encouraging kids to give, it’s really easy to give them simple prompts or demonstrations and get them to give 50 percent,” Blake says. The prompt might be a suggestion or a statement designed to encourage sharing, or a demonstration by an adult who gives some or all of their share away. Children might witness an adult receiving praise for their generosity.
“If we ask them to, ‘just do what you think is fair,’—just mentioning the word ‘fairness’—they’ll give half.
“You can say, ‘Well, the other kid who’s receiving this really needs it,’—they’ll give up to half,” Blake says.
What’s fascinating is that while such techniques tend to encourage children to give more than they otherwise would, it seems “almost impossible” to prompt them to give any more than half.
“That’s the puzzle that interests us; it’s really asymmetrical,” he says. “If they initially were giving nothing, and you say, ‘Watch what I do, I’m giving half away,’ they’ll give half. If you say, ‘Watch what I do, I’m giving 90% to someone else,’ they’ll give half.”
Even in studies where a child has “earned” a resource by performing a task, but they can see a peer worked harder than them and deserves more, they’ll rarely give more than they keep.
One of the few exceptions to the 50% limit was a study Blake conducted with collaborators in rural India. Adults and children received 10 pieces of candy each. Adults modelled various levels of giving, then children were given the choice: keep all theirs or give some away. Remarkably, when adult models gave more than half, children did as well.
“By the time they were five and six years of age, they would give up to nine pieces away,” Blake says. But they would also be more selfish if the adult just gave one.
When the same study was repeated in the US, and the adult model gave 90% away, the children didn’t. “They’re like, ‘I’ll give up to half’. They would increase, but they hit that ceiling again.” The fact Indian kids seemed more inclined to follow an adult’s lead than American kids suggested generosity, which Blake already considered heavily dependent on context, might be more influenced by culture than he’d originally thought.
The role of culture and norms
Behavioral scientist Margaret Echelbarger agrees that cultural context is likely to influence how children define and practice generosity, as do family norms.
If children grow up hearing, and seeing, that “in our family we share, in our community we help” they’re likely to internalize and adopt those norms, Echelbarger says. But they’ll also be influenced by the wider culture they’re in. If it’s more individualistic than prosocial, and it perpetuates the view a certain level of ruthlessness or competitiveness is required for success, they’ll likely absorb that too.
When it comes to acts of generosity, as with acts of kindness, there’s the act as it’s perceived by the giver, and the act as it’s perceived by the recipient, Echelbarger notes.
A child who’s told to share half, and does so out of obligation, might not consider the act generous or expect gratitude.
“However, from the recipient’s perspective, it could be construed as a form of generosity, even if it were required,” she says.
An act might be perceived as more or less generous depending on what motivated a person—from compassion to kindness to fairness, to a desire to please and be praised—and what the act might have cost them.
Echelbarger says it’s encouraging to see children consistently display prosocial behavior from a very young age, tending to willingly help others without explicit rewards by toddlerhood.
They also tend to “incorporate equity concerns”, such as who’s starting with more, when called on to share. This plays out differently with age. Younger children show inequity aversion: “I don’t want you getting more than me”, while older children start to add “and I don’t want more than you”.
Beyond self-interest
Blake says that once kids reach the age of eight or nine, they’re more flexible and much less concerned about their own self-interest. They tend to do the right thing when no one’s watching, which suggests they’ve “internalized values like fairness”. And when people are watching, they care more about being seen to be fair—provided that’s a behavior those around them, particularly peers, admire. “The idea is that if it’s beneficial to their reputations to look more generous, they’ll be more generous.”
Echelbarger says children might also be more generous when they’re more aware of the positive impact a generous act could have on the recipient.
“If you can imagine the positive impact you’re having on other people, or how other people might feel in response to your generosity, maybe you’re more likely to engage in it, because you can imagine a world where your doing good means something.”
Blake says one possible explanation for the tendency to give no more than half is that it’s self-protective—children don’t want to put themselves at a disadvantage—and that the barrier of 50% might be a “reasonable” stopping point that prevents them from being taken advantage of.
While he still wants to test the theory further, he suspects most parents would be happy if their child were generous enough to give half. The good news is that this, at least, is “pretty easy” for adults to encourage. Us adults can talk about fairness and need; we can recognize and praise generous acts; and we can model generosity, giving up to—or even more than half—ourselves.
Emma Wilkins is a Tasmanian journalist whose freelance work has been published by news outlets, print magazines, and literary journals in Australia and beyond. She has a particular interest in relationships, literature, culture, ethics, and belief.
