Prosocial Behaviour in Children

Prosocial Behaviour

Dr. Lindsay Cameron's lecture focuses on children's prosocial behavior and the social motivations behind it.

Key Topics

Defining prosocial behavior
Prosocial behavior in children and primates
Motivations for prosocial behavior in humans
Experimental designs for studying prosocial behavior

Defining Prosocial Behavior

Prosocial behavior is any voluntary, intentional action that benefits another person, regardless of whether the action is costly, neutral, or beneficial to the helper. Key aspects include:

Voluntary and Intentional: Not a byproduct of other behavior or forced.
Beneficial to Others: Helps others without direct benefits to the helper.
Potential Risk: May involve a risk to the helper.

Prosocial Behavior vs. Altruism

Altruism is a specific type of prosocial behavior where the action is costly to the helper (e.g., risking one's life to save someone). If there is no cost to the helper, it is still prosocial behavior.

Four Forms of Prosocial Behavior

Helping: Supporting others to achieve their goals.
Informing: Sharing useful information to assist someone (e.g., providing directions). Informing is often the easiest form of prosocial behavior.
Comforting: Providing emotional support.
Sharing: Sacrificing one's own resources for others. Sharing has been extensively studied, particularly in children.

Studies on Helping

Wernicke and Tomasello Study

Objective: To determine whether infants will help someone else.
Participants: Twenty-four 18-month-old infants.
Method: Infants were observed in 10 different scenarios where an experimenter struggled to achieve a goal.
Examples of Scenarios:
- Dropping an object
- Trying to balance books
- Being unable to reach a dropped object
Results:
- Children offered help without expecting rewards.
- Helping was voluntary and costly (giving up time and play).
- Children used cues from adults and the context to decide whether to help.
- Children were more likely to help when the adult showed distress.
Researchers manipulated whether the adult needed help by varying the distress level. Children helped when they knew the adult needed the help.

Wernickeen Study (2007)

Objective: Investigate children helping in an altruistic manner.
Method: Similar scenarios as the previous study, but manipulated the difficulty of helping (obstacle course vs. easy access).
Results: Infants helped equally, regardless of the difficulty.
A second study in this series introduced rewards, but this made no difference to the children's intentionality to help.

Role of Parents in Helping Behavior

Two conditions were investigated: active parental encouragement and passive parental presence.
Finding: There was no difference in whether children helped, regardless of parental involvement.
Researchers questioned whether children were genuinely trying to help or simply restore the physical order of things.

Study on Instrumental Helping (restoring things to how they should be)

Objective: To determine whether children genuinely help or try to restore situations.
Participants: Fifty-one two-year-old children.
Method: Adults dropped relevant (pen) and irrelevant (peg, cloth) items.
Results: Children primarily picked up the object relevant to the task

Study on Arousal and Social Motivation

Objective: To investigate whether children's arousal is triggered by social motivation to see others helping appropriately.
Method: Children observed helping behavior between adults. Adults dropped an item and another adult either helped, didn't help, or used "magic" to return the object.
Findings: Arousal (pupil dilation) increased only when the helper gave the adult the wrong object.
- No pupil dilation when magic was used to return the item to the person.
- Children only reacted to the situation when it was a social situation and when they were wanting to help.

Svetlova Study

Objective: To study different forms of prosocial behavior and how they change with age.
Participants: 65 eighteen- and thirty-month-old infants.
Method: The children had the opportunity to engage in instrumental helping, empathic helping, or altruistic helping.
- Instrumental Helping: Experimenter drops something and needs help.
- Empathic Helping: Experimenter has a bad hair day and needs a hair clip.
- Altruistic Helping: Experimenter needs the child's hair clip (the costly one).
Results: The younger the children, the more cues they needed to help.
Younger children needed a clear cue to prompt them to help.
Older children (30-month-olds) helped even without direct cues.
For the Emotion task: Children need much more obvious cues for emotional situations.

Proactive Helping Study (Wernicke in 2013)

Objective: To see: Can children proactively help in a situation where an adult doesn't provide any behavioural cues that help is needed?
Method: Two-year-olds watched an experimenter accidentally drop an object without noticing.
Results: Children spontaneously intervened by helping, even without any cues.
Helping increased from 21 to 31 months of age.

Peer-on-Peer Helping

HEPAC Study

Objective: Looked at peer on peer helping.
Participants: About 100 and 90 eight, 18 and 30 old toddlers, using 48 dyads (pairs) (same age group).
Method: Used a task where two children need to complete it involving marbles running down a tube. This required mutualistic helping.
Three conditions:
- Mutualistic helping (both benefit).
- No need control.
- Altruistic help (only one benefits).
Altruistic helping condition: A curtain was put up so that the child who had to fetch the ball to give to the one who's playing, they put this curtain so they can't actually see this toy. They don't really benefit from it in any way, they just have to hand the ball to the other child.
Results: Researchers found that the helper needed significantly more compared to a no need.
Findings suggest that toddler skills and motivations for helping don't depend on having a competent and helpful recipient, such as an adult.

Ancedote: The professor shares a personal story regarding her son helping a robot..

Informing

Informing is to provide information for engaging in pro-social behaviors
Frequently studies with infants involve observation of pointing.
Two types of infant pointing:
- Imperative: Wants something from the adult.
- Declarative: Wants to share attention with the adult.

Study on Pointing Behavior

Method: The adult misplaced an object. The infants would guide an adult in the different situations and then they started searching for it.
Results: When an object had been dropped accidentally by the adult, infants did direct the person's attention to the location of where that object was.

Comforting

Comforting requires sympathy and empathy. Sympathy means feeling concern for others and empathy as well.

Developmental Stages of Comforting

Early Stages: Emotional contagion (crying when another baby cries).
18 Months: Differentiate between their own feelings and others.
3 Years: Competent in providing the right kind of comfort.

Emotional contagion: you might witness another child cry or an adult, and then you know, they can't differentiate yet between their own feelings and the other adult's feelings. And so then they start to feel that too.

Dunfield Study

Objective: Comfort requires sympathy, empathy, and differentiating between self and other from study about whether toddlers comfort others in distress.
Method: Examined 18- and 24-month-olds in helping, sharing, and comforting.
In testing for comforting, the experimenter would hit their knee on the edge of a table, which in turn hit something metal and would a loud bang.
Experimental Condition: Experimenter looks distressed and rubs knee but does not ask for help.
Control Condition: Experimenter bangs knee but remains neutral and doesn't react.
Results: 18- and 30-month-olds exhibited no sympathy; they simply froze.

Vish Study (2009)

Objective: Did you children could sympathizes with the person to whom something negative had happened but who had no emotions?
Method: The participant sat on their parents lap facing the experimenter at the table, facing experimenter number one while the second experimenter was on the child's right and then they kind of took their thing with destroyed their thing. There was also a pro social situation where the child in the experimenter number one, remember who was the victim, then move to a red carpet in the same room while the patient sat nearby.
Experimental Condition The adult either harming another adult by destroying something that was theirs or taking away something that was theirs
There was there was also a neutral condition in which there was no harm to the other person. Victim expressed no emotions in either of these conditions
Results: Even as early as 18 months of age, children showed concern for a stranger in a hurtful situation, even without emotional cues.

Study on Overreaction to Distress

In this type of question where they're looking at this overreaction is all about just how good are children at picking up on the different cues and contextual information to decide on their responses?
Method: Three-year-old children saw an adult displaying the exact same distress in three different situations.
- adult's distress was appropriate to what happened to them.
- the adult's distress was an overreaction to a minor inconvenience.
- no apparent reason for their distress
Results: Children are already differentiating and thinking about is that an appropriate response? Is that like what I would expect for that kind of incident to happen?
*Children's sympathy and pre social behaviour are not automatic responses to emotional display as they are are taking into account when the display of distress is justified or not when they're trying to decide on their response forming the response.

Sharing involves children's ability to understand fairness and justice in distributing things.

Studies that involve sharing mainly have children observe situations in a screen where there's fair or unfair distribution of items and then the children choose between the fair and the unfair distribution character (choose whether they like the character best; the one that shares things equally or unfairly).

Studies Investigating Sharing

Children gaze longer at the unfair allocation than the fair one, which suggests that they understand the concept of unfairness.
So in summary, these studies suggest that pre verbal infants (fifteen to eighteen months), they're expecting resources, they're expecting goods to be allocated equally, and they expect actors and experiments to distribute them equally, and they prefer fair over unfair distributions.

Third-Party Allocation

What you can do is give children some resources to share, and the child themselves won't get any of them; they're just shading it between two other actors (so two other people -- the child themselves don't gain).

Researchers find in that scenario is that if you give children the unequal number of sweets, say 11, they would rather remove one than not share equally (so they'd rather just take that one out and give five each to the children -- so they do not want to share things unequally). So if somebody gave you 10 pounds and know said you can either shave it or you can keep it, what would you do? I would keep it if somebody gave me 10 pounds. So think about that with children. There's different things that are valuable to them at different amounts.

Choice Tasks

Here children have to make a decision, such as you get to keep a candy or you get one and the other child gets one. What we find is that three year olds prefer to take one and give one to the other child over keeping both for themselves, even though that is a costly choice.

Dictator Game

You give the child a number of items and say do whatever you want. You've got these items; you can do whatever you want with them. When the three to four year olds were asked how others should share, they expected that others will share equally, even though they didn't do that themselves.

What if we put children together to see how they share their resources with peers?

Used marbles; allocated unequally (example: three marbles were ruled to one side of the table in one to the other).
They had to work together in pairs to share them equally. First of all, they had to try and get access to the marbles, and they had to work together for that.
Findings: 3 year olds would share with their partner after a collaboration

Influencing Factors

More likely to help family and friends than strangers.
Culture: collectivist cultures --> children share more than in cultures that value independent approach to life.
Gender also plays a role becuase of a stereotypic expectation that girls will help more.
Parenting styles and Siblings can play a role

Prosocial Behavior in Chimpanzees

Chimpanzees do help others and do pick up dropped objects.

Motivational Factors

The debate: nature vs nurture

Do rewards, giving praise for doing something that's pro-social is
not going to enhance pro social behaviors in those young children because they are intrinsically motivated to do it (it's not dependent on extrinsic factors).
The praise worked and encouragement worked, but giving a reward which makes it extrinsically motivated stop the future pro social behaviours.
What is driving children's motivation to be pro social?
Is there an evolutionary explanation or any other explanations that you might be able to think of that we haven't covered today?