How Children Get the Christmas Spirit

How Children Get the Christmas Spirit

What leads to the generosity so important to Christmas? A look at new brain-wave research about the way children think

By Alison Gopnik in the Wall Street Journal

As we wade through the towers of presents and the mountains of torn wrapping paper, and watch the children’s shining, joyful faces and occasional meltdowns, we may find ourselves speculating—in a detached, philosophical way—about generosity and greed. That’s how I cope, anyway.

Are we born generous and then learn to be greedy? Or is it the other way round? Do immediate intuitive impulses or considered reflective thought lead to generosity? And how could we possibly tell?

Recent psychological research has weighed in on the intuitive-impulses side. People seem to respond quickly and perhaps even innately to the good and bad behavior of others. Researchers like Kiley Hamlin at the University of British Columbia have shown that even babies prefer helpful people to harmful ones. And psychologists like Jonathan Haidt at New York University’s Stern School of Business have argued that even adult moral judgments are based on our immediate emotional reactions—reflection just provides the after-the-fact rationalizations.

But some new studies suggest it’s more complicated. Jason Cowell and Jean Decety at the University of Chicago explored this question in the journal Current Biology. They used electroencephalography, or EEG, to monitor electrical activity in children’s brains. Their study had two parts. In the first part, the researchers recorded the brain waves of 3-to-5-year-olds as they watched cartoons of one character either helping or hurting another.

The children’s brains reacted differently to the good and bad scenarios. But they did so in two different ways. One brain response, the EPN, was quick, another, the LPP, was in more frontal parts of the brain and was slower. In adults, the EPN is related to automatic, instinctive reactions while the LPP is connected to more purposeful, controlled and reflective thought.

In the second part of the study, the experimenters gave the children a pile of 10 stickers and told them they could keep them all themselves or could give some of them to an anonymous child who would visit the lab later in the day. Some children were more generous than others. Then the researchers checked to see which patterns of brain activity predicted the children’s generosity.

They found that the EPN—the quick, automatic, intuitive reaction—didn’t predict how generous the children were later on. But the slow, thoughtful LPP brain wave did. Children who showed more of the thoughtful brain activity when they saw the morally relevant cartoons also were more likely to share later on.

Of course, brain patterns are complicated and hard to interpret. But this study at least suggests an interesting possibility. There are indeed quick and automatic responses to help and to harm, and those responses may play a role in our moral emotions. But more reflective, complex and thoughtful responses may play an even more important role in our actions, especially actions like deciding to share with a stranger.

Perhaps this perspective can help to resolve some of the Christmas-time contradictions, too. We might wish that the Christmas spirit would descend on us and our children as simply and swiftly as the falling snow. But perhaps it’s the very complexity of the season, that very human tangle of wanting and giving, joy and elegy, warmth and tension, that makes Christmas so powerful, and that leads even children to reflection, however gently. Scrooge tells us about both greed and generosity, Santa’s lists reflect both justice and mercy, the Magi and the manger represent both abundance and poverty.

And, somehow, at least in memory, Christmas generosity always outweighs the greed, the joys outlive the disappointments. Even an unbeliever like me who still deeply loves Christmas can join in the spirit of Scrooge’s nephew Fred, “Though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket [or, I would add, an entirely uncomplicated intuition of happiness in my brain], I believe that Christmas has done me good, and will do me good, and, I say, God bless it!”