Don’t Decide for Me!

Have you ever volunteered to give something to someone else?

You probably felt great about it, right?
And has it ever happened that someone decided for you that you would give something to someone else?

It probably didn’t feel so great anymore, right?

Agency is our ability to influence what happens around us. A sense of agency is often linked to satisfaction.

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In this study, the research team (Tom Gordon-Hecker from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Shoham Choshen-Hillel from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Alex Shaw from University of Chicago) examined whether a sense of agency can influence children’s satisfaction with unequal distributions.

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In other words, they tested whether kids who can influence how resources are divided—and therefore feel a sense of agency—would be more satisfied with a situation where another child gets more than they do, compared to kids who see the same situation but have no say in it at all.

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The researchers hypothesized that when children (and adults) are given the opportunity to help another person and be generous, the pleasant feeling ("warm glow") that accompanies the choice to help others softens the discomfort associated with inequality.

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To answer this question, the researchers conducted two experiments with 417 children aged 4 to 10. They compared children’s satisfaction in two different situations: in the first, the children could choose whether to give another child a larger prize than the one they themselves received; in the second, the prize given to the other child was determined by a coin toss. ​

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The results? The kids were more satified when they chose to let the other kid get more prizes, rather than when it was decided in a lottery. 

Another intresting finding was that age didn't matter! Whether the participants were 4 or 10 years old, that sense of agency made the exact same impact on their happiness.