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While humans are inherently social beings, psychology studies suggest that their social skills are gradually fine-tuned over time and with experience. Understanding when different social skills emerge and how they typically develop could help devise new strategies that encourage people to behave prosocially and cooperate with others around them.
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Researchers at London School of Economics, University of Stavanger and University of Milan-Bicocca recently carried out a study exploring how social behaviors emerge and become stable across childhood. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that while kindness and cooperation are intuitive behaviors in early childhood, they later become deliberate and part of children's personal disposition.
"Our study was initially motivated by the wish to extend findings of our previous paper in Scientific Reports," Elena Nava, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.
"In this earlier research, we examined people from adolescence to old age and asked them to make cooperative decisions either quickly or after taking time to reflect. We found that the relationship between intuition and cooperation changed across the lifespan. We particularly observed that adolescents were more cooperative when they had time to think, whereas intuitive cooperation became more evident from young adulthood onward."
Tracing the early emergence of deliberative prosociality
Nava and her colleagues wanted to extend their earlier research with adolescents and adults to a younger population. Their recent study specifically examined the social behaviors of 537 children ages 3 to 10.
"The children were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: Some had to make their decisions quickly, within 10 seconds, while others had to wait at least 10 seconds and think carefully before responding," explained Nava. "This allowed us to compare more intuitive decisions with more reflective, deliberative ones across different ages. Each child completed a series of child-friendly social games, mainly using candies and fictional partners whom the children believed were real."
The children who participated in the team's study were asked to engage in different games designed to assess specific social behaviors. These games required children to share candies with each other or say how they would behave in specific social scenarios.
For instance, the children's cooperation was assessed based on how many candies they contributed to a common pool that would benefit the whole group of participants. Their altruism was inferred based on how many candies they decided to share with another child.
The researchers also examined the children's responses to fairness, based on whether they accepted or rejected fair and unfair offers made to them while playing games. They also looked at how honest each child was, based on whether they told the truth or lied to gain a personal advantage. Finally, the team probed the children's moral judgment by looking at how they responded to simplified moral dilemmas that entailed helping many other children but harming one.
"A particularly important aspect of the study was that we did not examine every game in isolation," said Nava. "Instead, we used a statistical method called factor analysis to see whether different behaviors tended to go together. For example, were children who cooperated more also more likely to share and tell the truth? This approach allowed us to identify broader underlying tendencies, rather than labeling a child as cooperative, altruistic or honest based on a single task."
The shift from instinctive kindness to thoughtful cooperation
The team also looked at how children's social tendencies changed at different ages and how long it took them to make decisions during games. Their analyses allowed them to determine whether children changed their social behaviors over time, but also to understand how the mental processes underpinning their social decisions changed.
"In this way, we could study not only whether children became more or less prosocial as they grew older, but also whether they made decisions spontaneously and intuitively, or increasingly supported by reflection," said Nava.
The results of the researchers' analyses suggest that how children make prosocial decisions changes as they grow older. Specifically, younger children appear to make prosocial decisions more intuitively and spontaneously, while older ones sometimes appear to reason or reflect more before making decisions that will positively affect others.
"One of our most notable findings is that prosocial behavior appears to be strongly intuitive very early in childhood," said Francesco Margoni, co-first author of the paper. "Among the youngest children, especially around ages 3 to 4, those who had to decide quickly were generally more cooperative, honest and willing to benefit others than those who were asked to stop and think. This suggests that prosociality is not only the product of teaching, self-control or mature moral reasoning: Some of its foundations are already present in children's immediate responses."
Interestingly, the team found that intuitive prosocial behaviors remained relatively stable across childhood, meaning that children of all ages could sometimes make spontaneous decisions that positively affected others. The frequency of deliberate and pondered prosocial behaviors, on the other hand, appeared to gradually increase with age.
"By about 9 or 10 years of age, children who had time to reflect were just as prosocial as those deciding quickly," explained Margoni. "In other words, development did not seem to replace an early 'good instinct' with rational self-interest. Instead, reflection gradually learned to support prosocial behavior too. Children may begin by doing good spontaneously and later become increasingly able to understand and deliberately choose why doing good is appropriate."
Guiding more studies focusing on human social development
The recent work by Nava, Margoni and their colleagues offers new insights into the emergence and development of cooperation, altruism, honesty, fairness and morality across childhood. In contrast with some previous studies, the team's research considered all these dimensions of prosociality collectively, instead of treating them as entirely different skills or traits.
"Our analysis suggests that the important question is not simply whether people become more or less prosocial with age, but how they arrive at a prosocial decision," said Margoni. "The same outward behavior may initially be driven mainly by intuition and later become supported by reflection, moral rules, awareness of consequences and a better understanding of other people."
In the future, this recent study could help devise new educational strategies that may foster prosociality, for instance helping children better understand others, cooperate with their peers and promote fairness during play. As part of their next studies, Nava and Margoni will further explore the mental processes underpinning how children, adolescents and adults make different types of social decisions.
"We will continue using this powerful fast-and-slow decision-making paradigm to distinguish intuitive from more deliberative thinking across different aspects of social and moral behavior," added Margoni. "We plan to study topics such as how people decide whether to punish wrongdoing and how they think about authority. One particularly interesting question is whether young children already exhibit an intuitive tendency to obey authority, or whether this intuition develops and becomes internalized only later in life."
Written for you by our author Ingrid Fadelli,edited by Lisa Lock, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—thisarticle is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive.If this reporting matters to you,please consider a donation (especially monthly).
More information: Francesco Margoni et al, Stable intuition and the rise of deliberative prosociality in childhood, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02487-4
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This story was originally published on Phys.org.
