From biological to social sciences, the origins of prosociality such as sharing, cooperating and helping (1, 2) fascinated researchers due to its key role in the functioning of advanced human societies (3). While several developmental studies suggest that patience (4) and social norms are necessary to exert prosocial behaviors (5) others argue that prosociality is an instinctive and impulsive behavior (6, 7). We might thus wonder how prosociality can be the result of both impulsivity and rationality.
Patience (i.e. self-control) and age are positively correlated with prosocial actions. Children who perform better on inhibitory control tasks are more prosocial in cooperative play tasks with peers (8) and give more in sharing games (9). And more generally younger children (3- to 4-year-old), that usually have lower self-control, display more selfish behaviors than older children (7- to 8-year-old) in sharing games (10, 11). In addition, children better in inhibition as evaluated by parents, are more able to follow a norm with respect to altruistic giving in a dictator game (5) and display more in-group favoritism and egalitarian tendencies (10). Thus, prosociality shaped by norms and social structure seems to increase with age as with cognitive development including greater patience (12).
Importantly however, young children engage spontaneously in prosocial actions such as spontaneous helping (13–15) before the development of patience or the internalization of social norms. Furthermore, both children (16) and adults (6) are more prosocial in social dilemmas when given less time to respond and prompted to act “intuitively” suggesting that intuition supports prosocial impulse but that rational thought can hinder them. The development of certain cognitive abilities related to strategic thinking and reduced temporal discounting might thus have a negative impact on such prosocial impulses. Consequently, while engaging more and more in rational cognitive processes, prosociality could be reduced (17).
Studying the relationship between prosociality and patience in children will allow us to better understand the impulsive and rational components of prosociality. One important rational competence, developing between ages 4 to 6, is patience (18–20). Patience in children is traditionally evaluated with delay of gratification tasks, i.e. a trade-off between a small immediate reward vs. a larger future reward (21–23). While the investigation of the development of patience and prosociality is not new, there is a lack of studies that link the development of delay of gratification to the development of prosocial sharing. Only a limited number of studies looked at how delay of gratification is related to children’s prosocial sharing. A positive relationship between delay of gratification and reciprocal sharing was reported by Moore & Macgillivray (24) and Koomen et al. (25) in a modified delay of gratification task in which children could wait to provide benefits to a familiar third party and by Sebastián-Enesco & Warneken (26) where resources obtained in a delay of gratification task could be shared with a puppet. To our knowledge, no study has yet measured delay of gratification and prosocial sharing using two independent tasks where decisions regarding delay are independent from sharing decisions, and involving “real” same-age children as partners testing in a realistic environment (i.e. school).
Here, we evaluate whether a relationship can be observed between patience and prosocial sharing in 4- to 6-year-old children. Specifically, we tested 250 4- to 6-year-old children in a quiet room of their school in three different tasks: 1) a delay of gratification task involving a choice between one candy now vs. two candies at the end of the testing session, 2) a dictator game with an unknown child from another school, and 3) a dictator game with their self-reported “best-friend”. The two dictator games allow us to disentangle whether prosociality is influenced by strategic considerations.
Giving to unknown individuals can be interpreted as "pure" prosociality and has been extensively evaluated using dictator games (10, 27, 28). The fact that partners are unknown and the giving anonymous distinguishes these situations from situations involving reciprocal prosociality, where strategic concerns might influence behavior. Indeed, what might seem to be a prosocial behavior might be motivated by selfish motives if future benefits can be expected from the partner. In practice reciprocal prosociality might happen when interacting with known, familiar partners for the sake of future benefits (11). Our results provide evidence that patience in 4- to 6-year-old children is negatively linked to pure prosociality, however we observed no relationship between patience and reciprocal prosociality.