A Swiss study of four- to six-year-olds found that collaborative play strengthened friendship ratings but did not increase sharing when children were given unequal rewards.
A new study from Switzerland suggests that pairing young children in a shared task may not be enough to make them more generous, even if it does make them feel closer. Researchers working with 48 pairs of children aged four to six found that collaboration did not increase sharing when one child was later given a larger pile of sweets than the other. Yet both collaborative play and simple side-by-side play were associated with higher friendship ratings, hinting that time spent in the same activity can strengthen social bonds even when it does not prompt immediate prosocial behaviour.
The experiment, published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, used a cheese board game in which children guided a ball through a maze by manipulating strings. In one version, the two children had to work together, each controlling part of the task. In the other, they played in parallel, each on their own board. After the game, the researchers offered an unequal reward: one child received three sweets, the other just one. The so-called lucky child then had an unspoken chance to share, with no adult prompt and no comment about what they should do.
Sharing proved uncommon. The researchers reported that only 13 of the 48 children who had the extra sweets passed any on to their partner. That behaviour did not differ meaningfully by whether the children had collaborated, played separately, been paired with a boy or a girl, or known one another better before the game. In other words, the conditions that might seem most likely to encourage kindness did not reliably change the outcome. The study also found no clear link between initial friendship ratings and later sharing.
Friendship, however, moved in a different direction. Children in both play conditions gave their partners higher friendship scores after the activity than before it. That finding matters because it complicates a common assumption in schools and early years settings: that if children work together, they will automatically become kinder, more generous and more socially connected in a measurable way. According to the study, collaboration may not be the decisive ingredient people imagine. Simply spending time alongside a peer, in a structured and positive setting, may be enough to improve how young children see one another. For teachers and parents, the lesson may be less about engineering elaborate group projects and more about recognising that ordinary shared classroom experiences can still shape children’s relationships.
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