Who makes the choice? The influence of choice on preschoolers’ sharing behaviors and feelings

Previous research has indicated that the freedom of choice influences children’s prosocial motivation. However, little research has investigated the impact on children’s prosocial motivation of, one, the quality of the relationship between the child and the adult who makes the choices, or two, the provision of reasonable explanations. We investigated these questions with children aged 4 to 5 in China. In Study 1, children were randomly assigned to one of three choice conditions: self-choice (the child could decide for themself whether to share with a puppet or not), mother-choice (the child’s mother instructed the child to share), and experimenter-choice (the experimenter instructed the child to share). Prosocial motivation was measured via children’s feelings during the sharing task and their sharing behaviors towards a novel partner. Meanwhile, mothers in the self-choice and the mother-choice conditions completed a questionnaire measuring child-mother relatedness. We found that although there was no overall significant difference in children’s sharing behaviors or feelings across the three conditions, mother-child relatedness significantly moderated the effect of choice condi-tion on children’s sharing feelings. Children who had positive relationships with their mothers demonstrated positive feelings when their mothers made the choice for them, similar to when they made the choice themselves. However, those who had neutral or nega-tive relationships with their mothers demonstrated worse feelings when their mothers made the choice for them compared to when they made the choice themselves. In Study 2, we further investigated where the provision of a reasonable explanation might influence children’s sharing motivation. We found that, when the mother provided an explanation, children shared more stickers with a novel partner than when children made choices themselves or when the mother forced them to share. These findings suggest that children’s prosocial motivations do not necessarily decrease when others make choices for them; instead, interpersonal relatedness and provi-sion of explanations can protect children’s prosocial motivations.