written by Tara Haelle

When the basket is passed around at church for tithing, do you put in more than you would if you think someone is watching? Or what if you’re writing a check to a charitable organization. If they are standing beside you watching you, are you inclined to write it for a little more than if you were mailing it off to a faceless envelope-opener?

Generally, the answer for most adults is “yes.” While adult are somewhat unique in our great generosity in the animal kingdom, we are also conscious of how that generosity is perceived. Research has shown that adults tend to be more generous if they know someone is paying attention. But what about kids?

Apparently, little humans learn pretty young to modify the extent of their generosity if they know it’s not anonymous. In a study published today in PLoS ONE, researchers found that 5-year-olds make surprisingly sophisticated decisions about how much to give someone else based on whether their generous act is perceived by the other person.

Basically, if they know the recipient can see them and/or can see their choices, the preschoolers were more often generous in giving their classmate stickers. But if their classmate couldn’t see them and/or see the choices, they were generous much less often.

The experiment involved 32 preschoolers, half boys, half girls, and paired them with a classmate they knew. The researchers taught the kids to use a specially built box with levers that were pulled to distribute plastic eggs with the stickers in 16 trials.

For half of the trials, the eggs were transparent so the recipient could see what the options were for him to receive. In the other half, they were opaque. In half of the overall pairings of kids, the recipient could not see the giver. In the other half, the recipient and the giver could see each other.

In each the trials done with the kids, the giver was always given the same number of stickers for himself, regardless of what he chose to give his recipient. And in each trial, he had the option of giving the recipient peer either one sticker or four stickers. (If he gave his classmate one sticker, he did not get the other three. The researchers built in other parts to the experiment design to minimize other social factors that might influence how many stickers a child chose to give to their peer.)

The kids were generous enough to give their peer four stickers 48 percent of the time if they could see the recipient. But when the receiving classmate was out of sight, the kids were only generous 22 percent of the time. (They mostly gave their peer one sticker instead of four.)

Similarly, the kids were more generous if the eggs were clear than if they were opaque. In other words, if the recipient could see the sticker options, his classmate was more likely to give him four stickers instead of one. Both these patterns held true regardless of whether the giver was given one sticker or four stickers for himself. The least generous trials occurred when the kids couldn’t see each other and the stickers were in opaque eggs.

“The present results provide evidence that five-year-old children’s generosity is heavily influenced both by the presence of a visible audience and by the transparency of their actions,” the authors wrote. “These findings suggest that long before they develop a rich understanding of the social significance of reputation or are conscious of complex strategic reasoning, children behave more generously when the details of their prosocial actions are available to others.”

Perhaps these results shouldn’t be too surprising since children begin lying to protect others (or themselves) about age three and begin to understand the power of gossip by about age 5. But it’s still fascinating to think kids are making pretty calculated decisions in something as simple as giving someone else some stickers.