Increased sharing between collaborators extends beyond the spoils of collaboration

Research has shown that preschoolers increase equal sharing after collaborating to earn resources, suggesting that collaboration may be an important context for the development of fairness. The current study explored the influence of specific components of collaborative interactions to better understand the social cognitive foundations of this precocious increase in equal sharing. The effects of three forms of collaborative interaction on children's sharing were compared: collaborating toward a joint concrete goal of earning resources that could subsequently be shared, collaborating toward a joint concrete goal without earning resources, and playing a social game without earning resources. Replicating previous work, a significant increase in the proportion of equal sharing was observed when children shared collaboratively earned resources. Extending these findings, collaboration toward a concrete goal resulted in increased sharing regardless of whether resources were earned collaboratively or given outside of the collaborative context. Social play alone was not found to influence children's sharing, highlighting the importance of the context of collaboration toward a concrete goal to increase children's sharing. Overall, these findings suggest that collaborating toward a shared concrete goal fosters a general increase in prosociality that extends beyond the context of sharing collaboratively earned resources.