Media Releases

Disasters can prompt older children to be more giving, younger children to be more selfish

January 30, 2013

TORONTO, ON — A nat­ur­al dis­as­ter can bring out the best in old­er chil­dren, prompt­ing nine-year-olds to be more will­ing to share, while six-year-olds become more self­ish, researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, and Liaon­ing Nor­mal Uni­ver­si­ty found in a rare nat­ur­al exper­i­ment in Chi­na around the time of a hor­rif­ic earth­quake.

A cru­cial dif­fer­ence between the two age groups emerged one month after the dis­as­ter.  Six-year-olds’ will­ing­ness to share in a test to mea­sure altru­ism, dropped by a third, while among nine-year-olds, will­ing­ness to give to oth­ers near­ly tripled.  Three years lat­er chil­dren in the age groups returned to pre-earth­quake lev­els of altru­ism.

“The study pro­vides the first evi­dence to sug­gest that expe­ri­enc­ing a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter affects children’s altru­is­tic giv­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly,” said Kang Lee, Uni­ver­si­ty Dis­tin­guished Pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to.

Six-year-olds opt­ed for self-preser­va­tion, where­as nine-year olds opt­ed for enhanced altru­ism, the study showed.  “The imme­di­ate neg­a­tive effect of the earth­quake on six –year-olds sug­gests that altru­ism at that age is still frag­ile,” Lee said.

“We think that empa­thy is the inter­ven­ing vari­able,” said Jean Dece­ty, the Irv­ing B. Har­ris Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­o­gy and Psy­chi­a­try at UChica­go, a mem­ber of the research team.  The study demon­strates the devel­op­men­tal dif­fer­ences in the growth of empa­thy, Dece­ty explained.

As chil­dren grow up, their pre­frontal cor­tex­es mature with improved con­nec­tions among the cir­cuits involved with emo­tion. “As they grow old­er, chil­dren become able to bet­ter reg­u­late their own vic­ar­i­ous emo­tions and under­stand bet­ter what they feel and more includ­ed to act pro-social­ly.

“Even with the group of nine-year-olds, we show that not only are they more altru­is­tic and give more than the six-year-olds, but those nine-year olds with high­er empa­thy scores donat­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than nine-year-olds with low­er scores,” Dece­ty added.

The study will be pub­lished in a paper “Expe­ri­enc­ing a Nat­ur­al Dis­as­ter Alters Children’s Altru­is­tic Giv­ing,” in an upcom­ing issue of the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence.  Lee, who is a pro­fes­sor at the Eric Jack­man Insti­tute of Child Study, was lead author. Two Chi­nese aca­d­e­mics, Drs. Hong Li and Yiyuan Li from Liaon­ing Nor­mal Uni­ver­si­ty were also part of the team.

Researchers had already been in Sichuan, Chi­na in 2008 begin­ning a study of empa­thy and altru­ism among chil­dren and fin­ished the first por­tion of its study when an earth­quake struck in May. The earth­quake killed 87,000 peo­ple.

The team imme­di­ate­ly decid­ed to change the course of the study and explore what the expe­ri­ence of a dis­as­ter might mean to the children’s con­cern for oth­ers.

In the study, the team test­ed children’s altru­ism by hav­ing them indi­vid­u­al­ly pick 10 favorite stick­ers from a set of 100.  After­wards they were told some of their class­mates were not includ­ed in the test and asked if they would give up some of the stick­ers for them to enjoy.

With­out the researcher watch­ing, chil­dren would put stick­ers into an enve­lope and seal it if they want­ed to share. The amount of stick­ers they chose to give up was deter­mined to be a mea­sure of altru­ism.

The chil­dren were also giv­en a stan­dard test of empa­thy in which they were asked their reac­tions after see­ing ani­mat­ed vignettes of peo­ple who are injured. Nine-year-olds had sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er scores on empa­thy on the test than six-year-olds.

Although there was a sig­nif­i­cant impact on altru­ism one month after the dis­as­ter, the study showed that groups of six-year-olds and nine-year-olds had sim­i­lar lev­els of altru­ism in fol­low up tests three years after the dis­as­ter as did sim­i­lar six-year-olds and nine-year-olds imme­di­ate­ly before the earth­quake.

“Expe­ri­ence with adver­si­ty, though gen­er­al­ly hav­ing neg­a­tive impacts on chil­dren, may in fact be ben­e­fi­cial, at least for old­er chil­dren, in evok­ing empa­thy towards and oth­ers and in turn enhanc­ing their altru­is­tic giv­ing, albeit tem­porar­i­ly,” the authors write.

The research was sup­port­ed by the John Tem­ple­ton Foun­da­tion, the Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties Research Coun­cil of Cana­da, and the Chi­nese Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion.

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