Study: Kids’ willingness to share may be related to their counting skills

By Gwyn Wright via SWNS

Young children who are good with numbers are more likely to share prized items with pals, according to a new study.

Researchers in the US found counting skills were the single biggest predictor of “fair sharing behavior” among three to five-year-olds.

Prompting children to count also made them more generous, the experts found.

For the world-first research, academics from Harvard University, Boston College and the University of California gave children a set of sharing tasks where they distributed stickers between themselves and another person.

Their first study explored the relationship between sharing behaviors and counting, cognitive control and working memory among 97 three to five-year-olds.

Sharing behaviors and counting were found to be closely linked.

Among children who had not yet learnt how to count, an intervention such as counting on animal cards made them more likely to share.

A second study of 219 three to five-year-olds was very similar but the counting and sharing tasks were made more alike.

Linguistic prompts were also made clearer to make connections more obvious for children who had trouble seeing links between cards with animals, which they were told to count, and stickers, which they were told to share.

The results again showed counting skills are related to sharing behaviors, and that counting prompts can encourage children to share.

The findings suggest one of the reasons some youngsters struggle to share is because they are still learning to count.

Study author Dr. Nadia Chernyak said: “This is the first research to investigate whether symbolic counting exerts a causal impact on sharing behavior.

“We reasoned that children who do not share fairly would benefit from the modeling of proper counting behaviors thereby providing them with a behavioral tool that would facilitate fair sharing.”

Study author Dr. Sara Cordes said: “It’s important to recognize the differences in how children and adults process, respond, emphasize, and encode numerical information.

“Children’s behavior should not be evaluated with what we think they ‘ought’ to be doing, but with respect to their developmental stage and a full understanding of their current cognitive abilities and how they relate to social skills.”

The findings were published in the journal Child Development.