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Children as young as 7 and teenagers largely agree that reserving trophies for top finishers motivates athletes to try harder and feel prouder than handing out participation awards to everyone, according to a new study published in Developmental Science. Yet only adolescents consistently predicted negative side effects from winner-only awards, expecting them to encourage cheating and physical risk-taking. Teenagers’ personal preferences for competitive versus inclusive trophy systems also aligned with how fast they believed they could run, suggesting that self-interest begins shaping views on fairness by adolescence.
At the end of many youth sports seasons, leagues choose between two competing rules for handing out awards. Inclusive, or egalitarian, reward systems give every participant the same recognition simply for showing up and taking part, whereas selective, or merit-based, systems reserve prizes for top performers based on measurable results.
Supporters of participation trophies argue that inclusive recognition fosters belonging and acknowledges effort, while critics contend that giving everyone the same prize dilutes achievement and dulls motivation. Selective trophies spark parallel disagreements between advocates who see them as fair recognition for excellence and critics who worry they create pressure to take unethical shortcuts or risk injury.
“Although these debates largely take place among adults, children are the ones who experience these reward systems,” study lead author Shuai Shao, who conducted the research at the University of California, San Diego, and is now at Boston College, told PsyPost. “We wanted to understand how children and adolescents themselves think about the implications of these reward systems and how their reasoning changes across development.”
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Developmental psychology research indicates that children begin weighing individual performance alongside strict equality during elementary school. While preschoolers often default to splitting items evenly, a 2016 experiment with 3- to 8-year-olds found that by age 8, children reliably accepted harder work as a fair reason to give one person a larger share while rejecting purely selfish requests. By adulthood, people’s views on fairness also tend to reflect their own personal standing, as a 2014 study of adults showed that individuals tend to favor equal or performance-based reward rules depending on whichever arrangement benefits them personally.
Most childhood studies, however, have examined one-time decisions about how to divide toys or snacks rather than how broader institutional rules influence emotions and behavior. In a 2025 study of workplace pay systems by the same researchers, children as young as 7, adolescents, and adults expected employees to work harder when pay depended on output rather than being divided equally, a finding the new study set out to replicate in a new setting.
That left an open question: would young people anticipate a wider range of trade-offs when the prize was a trophy rather than money? The researchers tested whether children and teenagers expect winner-only trophies not only to increase effort and pride, but also to encourage cheating and physical risk-taking, and explored whether young people’s confidence in their own athletic ability relates to which trophy system they prefer.
The researchers recruited 87 young people from the southwestern United States during 2024 and 2025, divided into two age brackets. The sample included 43 children aged 7 to 9 (with an average age of about 8.4) and 44 adolescents aged 15 to 18 (with an average age of about 16.9).
Those group sizes exceeded the 32 participants per age bracket needed to reliably detect medium-sized departures from an even 50-50 split. Five additional participants who missed at least one comprehension question were excluded in accordance with the study’s preregistration, a public research plan filed in advance and posted online alongside the data and analysis code.
Trained experimenters interviewed the 7- to 9-year-olds in person at local parks, while the teenagers completed an online survey featuring the exact same scenarios and wording. Every participant learned about a school holding two separate running events, each with 10 runners completing a single lap around a soccer field. In the “Trophies for All” event, everyone received a trophy just for showing up, whereas in the “Trophies for Winners” event, only the top three finishers received a trophy.
After the two events were introduced in randomized order, participants answered eight two-option questions presented in a fixed sequence across four areas: personal effort, pride, morality, and physical risk-taking. Each area included one positively framed question and one negatively framed question so that results would not depend on question wording alone.
Participants chose which event would make runners run faster or not try very hard, and which would make them feel more special or feel less proud after getting a trophy. They also predicted in which race runners would cheat to win or follow the rules, and in which they would risk getting hurt to win or focus on staying upright to avoid falling down.
While the main statistical tests comparing choices against random guessing were preregistered, the researchers noted that their specific expectations about age differences were not formally laid out in advance. The younger age group was included partly to explore when teenage-like reasoning begins to appear. Participants also completed an exploratory, non-preregistered section in which they chose which of the two races they would personally like to join and rated how fast they ran compared with peers their age on a five-point scale from “much slower” to “much faster.”
Because every core question offered a choice between the two events, random guessing would yield a 50% split. Compared against that 50% baseline, both age groups strongly linked selective trophies to greater effort: 72.1% of children and 100% of adolescents predicted that runners would run faster in the “Trophies for Winners” race, and large majorities in both groups likewise expected runners in the “Trophies for All” race to put in less effort.
Both groups also viewed selective awards as more emotionally meaningful than participation awards. Specifically, 81.4% of children and 95.5% of adolescents predicted that runners would feel more special after receiving a trophy in the winners-only event, and the exact same percentages expected recipients in the all-trophies event to feel less proud. Teenagers were more uniform in their answers than children on three of those four questions, though both age groups stood well above chance.
When the questions turned to rule-breaking, however, the two age groups diverged. Nearly all adolescents (95.5%) predicted that runners would be more likely to cheat in the “Trophies for Winners” event, and 68.2% expected runners in the “Trophies for All” event to be more likely to follow the rules. Among 7- to 9-year-olds, 65.1% chose the winners-only race for cheating and 62.8% chose the participation race for rule-following, neither of which was statistically significant compared with a 50-50 split. When the two age groups were compared directly, the smaller gap on rule-following was not statistically significant, unlike the much wider age gap on cheating.
Predictions about physical safety showed a similar age split. Every adolescent (100%) expected runners in the winners-only race to risk getting hurt in order to win, and 68.2% expected runners in the participation race to prioritize avoiding falls. Children’s answers hovered near an even split on both items (58.1% and 51.2%) and were not statistically significant; between age groups, the gap on avoiding falls was also not statistically significant, unlike the wide gap on risking injury.
Follow-up Bayesian analyses pointed the same way. That statistical check weighs how strongly data favor random guessing versus a real effect. For children’s risk-taking answers, the results leaned toward genuine chance responding rather than an undetected effect.
Shao emphasized how early this reasoning appears. “Even young children recognize that different reward systems can have different consequences,” he said.
In the exploratory questions about personal preferences, 62.8% of children and 63.6% of adolescents picked the “Trophies for Winners” race. Neither split was statistically significant, though both leaned toward the competitive race. Both groups rated their own running speed slightly above average on the five-point scale, and the difference between children’s average score (3.63) and adolescents’ average score (3.30) was not statistically significant.
Even so, perceived running ability related to event choices very differently depending on age. Among adolescents, higher self-rated running speed was associated with a greater likelihood of preferring the competitive “Trophies for Winners” event over “Trophies for All.” Among 7- to 9-year-olds, self-rated running speed showed virtually no connection to which race they wanted to join.
According to the authors, the core results indicate that an intuitive expectation linking merit-based rewards to harder work and stronger pride is already established by age 7, extending beyond money to symbolic awards like sports trophies.
To explain why only adolescents consistently anticipated cheating and physical risk-taking, the researchers suggest that teenagers draw on broader personal experience with competitive pressure and peer norms. Because young children are routinely taught by adults to follow rules and avoid danger, the authors also propose that predicting how a prize could motivate cheating or recklessness may require mentally setting aside everyday rules to imagine alternative scenarios, a skill known as counterfactual thinking that develops gradually across childhood.
The preference pattern also surprised the team. “We were surprised to find that adolescents who saw themselves as fast runners were more likely to prefer the event where only winners received trophies,” Shao noted. “This suggests that by adolescence, individuals may begin to prefer the reward system that best aligns with their self-interest.”
Because the study did not directly measure why participants favored one race over the other, the authors note that the exact reasons behind the teenage shift toward self-interest remain open to interpretation. They point to two possibilities: adolescents may grow more attentive to how reward rules align with their own chances of winning, or they may become more sensitive to social comparison and competitive standing among peers. Younger children, the researchers suggest, may instead approach the choice more aspirationally, picking whichever setup sounds appealing in the moment rather than weighing their actual odds of finishing in the top three.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Participants predicted how fictional runners would feel and behave in a brief story rather than competing for trophies themselves, so the findings capture young people’s beliefs about reward systems rather than how trophies affect real-world behavior on the field.
“For example, children might expect performance-based trophies to encourage greater effort, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they would work harder themselves under such a system,” Shao explained. “Nevertheless, understanding how children reason about different reward systems is important because these beliefs are likely to shape their preferences and how they approach situations involving rewards and competition.”
Comparing two separate age groups at one point in time also cannot directly track how individual children’s reasoning changes as they grow up, and the younger participants were interviewed in person at parks whereas the teenagers completed the survey online.
The wording of two questions may have nudged participants’ answers as well, since asking where runners would cheat or risk getting hurt “to win” echoed the framing of the “Trophies for Winners” event. Future studies using more neutral phrasing, such as asking what runners might do “to get a trophy,” could help rule out that possibility. Researchers could also examine whether young people reason the same way in settings where merit is more subjective than a footrace, such as school classrooms, or in hybrid sports leagues that give participation medals to everyone alongside larger trophies for top finishers.
Beyond refining survey scenarios, the team hopes to test how real-world prizes influence young people’s emotions and actions. “A key next step is to understand how participation-based versus performance-based reward systems affect children’s actual behavior, and whether those effects match expectations,” Shao said. “More broadly, we are interested in how the incentives children encounter shape their affect, behavior, cognition, and development.”
For parents, coaches, and educators deciding how to recognize young participants, the study points to the unspoken signals built into everyday awards. “One thing we hope this study highlights is that the way adults design reward systems can communicate meaningful messages to children about what is valued,” Shao added. “Whether a trophy goes to everyone or only to the top performers, children notice the difference, and their interpretations and beliefs may shape how they approach rewarded activities.”
The study, “Trophies for All? Children’s and Adolescents’ Reasoning About Inclusive Versus Selective Awards,” was authored by Shuai Shao and Gail D. Heyman.
