A new research has revealed the age when hard work adds a shine to lousy prizes.
As per the study, putting in a lot of effort to earn a reward can make unappealing prizes more attractive to kindergartners, but not to preschoolers.
The findings revealed that when 6-year-olds worked hard to earn stickers that they ultimately didn't like, they were loath to give them up, whereas 4-year-olds were comparatively eager to give the unappealing stickers away.
Avi Benozio of Bar-Ilan University and co-author Gil Diesendruck recruited 45 preschool-aged (roughly 4 years old) and 53 kindergarten-aged (about 6 years old) to participate in the study.
The researchers found that effort mattered a lot to 6-year-olds. With attractive stickers, the children gave away about 21percent if they had been relatively easy to get but only about 10percent when they were hard-earned.
Similarly, they gave away about 30percent unattractive stickers that were easily acquired but only about 17percent of the unattractive stickers that were hard to get.
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Intriguingly, effort didn't seem to influence 4-year-olds' decision making. When the stickers were attractive, they gave away roughly the same percentage regardless of how hard they had worked to earn them.
And the 4-year-olds actually gave away significantly more unattractive stickers when they had been hard to get compared to when they were easily earned.
The findings suggested that 6-year-olds, just like adults, tend to employ a cognitive strategy to accommodate the knowledge that they worked hard to earn an unattractive reward. Specifically, they translated their effort into value, choosing to keep more of the unappealing, hard-to-get stickers for themselves.
The 4-year-olds, on the other hand, seemed to make use of a behavioral strategy that involved distancing themselves from the offending stickers, choosing simply to part with more of them.
Benozio said that their research suggests that behaviors that appear to benefit another person - such as sharing stickers, may actually stem from the relationship that a child has with that object.
The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.