Kids have to learn reciprocity—the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” response—but not revenge, research finds.
“In our series of experiments, we thought we’d see that children would display positive direct reciprocity—the tendency to pay back those who have helped—from an early age. That wasn’t the case,” said lead author Nadia Chernyak, assistant professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California–Irvine. “Preschool-aged children showed almost no awareness that they should repay favors.”
