Prosocial Behavior

Introduction

  • Dr. Lindsay Cameron introduces the lecture on prosocial behavior.
  • Slides are available on Moodle.
  • The lecture will cover children's prosocial behavior and social motivation.
  • Fun experiments are designed to understand when children engage in these behaviors.

Defining Prosocial Behavior

  • Prosocial behavior includes any voluntary, intentional action that benefits others.
  • The outcome must be positive or beneficial for the recipient.
  • The action should be helpful without necessarily benefiting the helper directly.
  • It can involve a risk to the helper.
  • Altruism is a type of prosocial behavior that is costly to the person acting it out.

Forms of Prosocial Behavior

  • Helping: Supporting others to achieve their goals.
  • Informing: Sharing useful information.
  • Comforting: Providing emotional support.
  • Sharing: Sacrificing one's own resources for others.

Studies on Helping Behavior

  • Warneken and Tomasello (2006) Study:
    • Investigated whether infants would help someone achieve a goal.
    • Twenty-four 18-month-old infants tested in 10 different scenarios.
    • Various scenarios included dropping objects, balancing books, etc.
    • Children offered help without rewards.
    • The extent to which the experimenter appeared distressed was manipulated.
    • Children helped more when the adult needed help.
  • Warneken et al. (2007) Study:
    • Investigated whether children helping in an altruistic manner.
    • Manipulated how easy or difficult it was for the child to help.
    • No difference found between infants who could walk easily to the item and those who had to struggle.
    • Introducing rewards made no difference, and can be counterproductive.
    • Manipulated the role of parents (active vs. passive).
    • Found no difference if the parent was active or inactive.
  • Instrumental Helping:
    • Investigated whether children are genuinely trying to help or just restore order.
    • Fifty-one two-year-old children presented with similar scenarios.
    • Adult dropped relevant and irrelevant items.
    • Children picked up the object that was relevant to the task.
  • Arousal and Social Motivation:
    • Investigated whether children's arousal was triggered by social motivation.
    • Children observed helping behavior between adults.
    • If the helper gave the adult the irrelevant object, children's arousal increased.
    • Children only reacted to the situation when it was a social situation.

Changes in Prosocial Behaviors with Age

  • Svetlova Study:
    • 65 18- and 30-month-old infants.
    • Opportunity to help an adult in three contexts: instrumental, empathic, and altruistic.
    • Instrumental: Experimenter dropping something.
    • Empathic: Experimenter needing a hair clip.
    • Altruistic: Experimenter needing the child's hair clip.
    • Younger children need more cues to help.

Proactive Helping

  • Warneken (2013) Study:
    • Investigated whether children proactively help when an adult doesn't provide behavioral cues.
    • Experimenter drops an object accidentally without noticing.
    • Control condition: Experimenter drops something intentionally.
    • Children spontaneously intervened to help in the experimental condition.
    • Proactive helping increased from 21 to 31 months of age.

Peer-on-Peer Helping

  • HEPAC Study:
    • 198 18- and 30-month-old toddlers in 48 dyads.
    • Mutualistic helping condition: Task where two children need to complete it together.
    • No need control condition.
    • Altruistic help condition: Only enjoyable for one player.
    • Helper fulfilled peer's needs even when the task was engaging for the child needing help.
    • Toddler skills and motivations for helping don't depend on having a competent adult recipient.
  • Anecdote: Cameron's son helped a robot get up.

Informing

  • Easiest way to be prosocial.
  • Infants do this through pointing.
  • Two reasons for pointing behaviors:
    • Imperative: Wanting the adult to do something for them.
    • Declarative: Wanting the adult to share attention with them.
  • Liszkowski et al. Study:
    • Placed infants in situations where an adult had misplaced an object.
    • 18- and 12-month-old infants.
    • When an object had been dropped accidentally, infants directed person's attention to it.
    • Children are trying to inform the person of the object's location.

Comforting

  • Requires sympathy, feeling concern for others, and empathy.
  • Also involves differentiating between the self and the other.
  • Comforting develops gradually in children.
  • Emotional contagion: Primitive response of empathy.
  • By 18 months, children differentiate between their own feelings and others.
  • By 3 years, competent in providing the right kind of comfort.
  • Dunfield Study:
    • Examined the ability of 18- and 24-month-olds to engage in helping, sharing, and comforting.
    • Comforting tested by experimenter hitting their knee on edge of table.
    • Experimenter never asked for help.
    • No sympathy expressed from child or distress.
  • Vish Study:
    • Investigated whether young children could sympathize with a person with no emotions.
    • 18- and 25-month-olds shown an adult harming another adult.
    • Victim expressed no emotions in either of these conditions.
    • As early as 18 months, children showed concern for the harmed person.
    • Children in the harm condition held the experimenter more.
    • Correlation between concerned looks and pro social behavior.
  • HIPEC Study:
    • Do young children sympathize less in response to unjustified emotional distress?
    • Three-year-old children saw an adult displaying distress in three situations.
    • Level of concern goes down.
    • Children who witnessed the adult being appropriately upset showed concern.
    • When children did not know the cause, they did respond similarly.
    • The children who witnessed the adult overreacting showed lower levels of intervening.

Sharing

  • Involves children's ability to understand fairness and justice.
  • Children choose the fair character.
  • Even at a young age, children have a basic understanding of fairness.
    • Looking Behavior:
    • Experimenter places cookies on two plates for two children.
    • Allocation between two children in either equal or an uneven allocation.
    • Children gaze longer at the unfair allocation than the fair one.
    • Understand the concept of unfairness.

Fairness

  • Pre-verbal infants expect resources to be allocated equally.
  • They prefer fair over unfair distributions.
  • Children share with their mums is in the context of giving.
  • They become reluctant to share belongings as well.
  • Third-party Allocation Scenario:
    • Getting rid of ownership factor in experiment designs.
    • Researchers give children resources to share and the child does not get any in return.
    • Distribute sweets between two people.
    • If give unequal number of sweets they would rather remove one than not share equally.
  • Choice Tasks:
    • Have to make a decision to either keep a candy or give one to another.
    • Three year olds prefer one and give one but not below five years of age.
  • Dictator Game:
    • Very costly scenario.
    • Give child a number of items and say do whatever you want.
    • Younger children used to keep the majority resources to themselves.
    • At five to nine years of age, start to share more equally.

Knowledge Behavior Gap

  • Children know that they should share equally, but they don't always do it.
  • Three year old children know that they should be sharing equally and don't do it.
  • Seven to eight year olds know to share half and do it.
  • The examples that children were asked to share with were tested with an adult and not another peer.
  • Different things that are valuable at different amounts, such as chocolates.
  • What if we put children together to see how they share with peers?
    • Used marbles.
    • Allocated unequally.
    • Share them equally.
    • Three-year-olds share after the collaboration.

Conclusion

  • Show a variety of positive social behaviors from early on.
  • Humans have a genuine concern for the welfare of others.
  • Does not depend on having a competent recipient from an adult.
  • Influencing factors like helping family members and strangers.
  • Important because in collectivist culture children share more.
  • Gender plays a role.
  • Parenting style, modeling.
  • Evolutionary explanation.
  • All to do with investing in peer.

Prosocial Behavior Unique to Humans?

  • Research has looked to study chimpanzees to look at there behavior.
  • Chimps helping behavior.
  • Similar to helping as infants.
  • Infants are not able to point.
  • Only chimps in captivity can point.
  • These chimps want something and imperatively point.
  • Some literature shows some potential for empathy in chimps.
  • There is passive food sharing with chimps, especially when under pressure to share.

What Motivates Children In Their Behaviors

  • Many debates about behavior innate or external.
  • Universal, the onset is the same age across cultures.
  • Giving reward or praise does not enhance the prosocial behavior.

Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation

  • They can either help the person and others help.
  • When no help was given arousal was higher.
  • If children helped or saw others helping arousal went away.
  • Praise is good encouragement, but rewards is not good because it stops the behaviors later on.

Overall

  • Prosocial behavior and children motivation debated.
  • What is dry the children to be prosocial.