Dorsa Amir

But it's hard to do because you really want those candies.

And this is the kind of choice that children are facing all the time.

And it turns out it just takes a lot of time and a lot of cultural input and experience to really, I think, internalize that and understand and be able to make those short-term decisions with this idea potentially that in the long run they're going to benefit you.

That's right.

And David, if you didn't like Starburst, you would be excluded from our study, in fact.

But this is one of the cross-cultural universals that I have documented, is that virtually all the children in all these studies told us that they liked candy and they could participate.

So essentially, we do a lot of these tasks very much like how I described, which is that we set up different situations for kids and we ask them to make real decisions about how to allocate different resources.

And so in some of our experiments, we used Starburst.

Skittles and some we use Starburst.

We're using stickers, like things that kids really like and have an affinity for.

And we make these very simple types of distribution decisions.

So for instance, I might say, okay, the first child who's here is going to get four candies.

The other one is going to get one.

And then we ask the first child, what do you think we should do?

Should we enact this?

Do you think this is fair?

Or do you think we should reject this?

And what you find is that at younger ages in these types of tasks, children are like, yes, please.

They say yes to that decision.

They get four.