Is young children's helping affected by helpees' need? Preschoolers, but not infants selectively help needy others

Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks

Capacities to understand and evaluate others' actions are fundamental to human social life. Infants and toddlers are sensitive to the costs of others' actions, infer others' values from the costs of the actions they take, and prefer those who help others to those who hinder them, but it is largely unknown whether and how cost considerations inform early understanding of third-party prosocial actions. In three experiments (N = 94), we asked whether 16-month-old toddlers value agents who selectively help those who need it most. Presented with two agents who attempted two tasks, toddlers preferentially looked to and touched someone who helped the agent in greater need, both when one agent's task required more effort and when the tasks were the same but one agent was weaker. These results provide evidence that toddlers engage in need-based evaluations of helping, applying their understanding of action utilities to their social evaluations.

Not just if, but how much: Children and adults use cost and need to make evaluations about generosity across contexts

Evaluations of others' generosity are critical for selecting quality social partners, yet the factors which systematically affect these evaluations and whether they vary across development are still relatively unclear. Here, we establish that two key dimensions adults and children (aged 4 to 7 years) consider are the cost associated with a giving action and the need of the recipient, through six pre-registered experiments with Canadian and U.S. American participants. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults' and children's third-party evaluations of generosity are sensitive to variations in each factor, across several operationalizations of cost and need in both comparative and standalone contexts, suggesting cost and need can be spontaneously evoked. However, children's responses were more consistent for need scenarios than cost scenarios. In Experiments 3 and 4, we modified our scenarios to evaluate whether variations in cost and need are considered simultaneously in both generosity evaluations and affiliative preferences. Adults' and older children's (ages 6 to 7) evaluations of generosity and affiliative preferences were sensitive to both factors, but younger children did not utilize this information systematically. Importantly, in Experiments 5 and 6, adults' and older children's generosity evaluations were only sensitive to information about cost and need when the giver's actions conferred utility to a recipient, but not when actions were self-serving. Taken together, we establish robust evidence that cost and need are considered in generosity evaluations by demonstrating that Canadian and U.S. American adults and children utilize this information consistently, spontaneously, and simultaneously.

Preschool children's evaluations of their own unjustified requests

To make a fair request, requesters should consider the perspective of the requestee and contrast his or her needs with their own needs. Making an unjustified request (e.g., requesting something we do not need but the requestee does need) can induce some negative feelings such as guilt. Here, we investigated whether making unjustified requests resulted in negative emotions in 3- and 5-year-old children. Participants (N = 83; 34 girls) requested resources that they did or did not need from an experimenter who either did or did not need them. Both age groups were slower and more hesitant to make an unjustified request (children did not need the sticker, but the experimenter did) and also showed lowered body posture when making an unjustified request compared with when making a justified request (children needed the sticker, but the experimenter did not). Three-year-olds showed more pronounced changes in their posture, whereas 5-year-olds' emotional expression was overall more blunted. Rather, older children relied more on verbal indirect utterances (e.g., "You've got lovely stickers"), as opposed to direct requests (e.g., "Can I have that sticker?"), when making unjustified requests. These results suggest that preschool children already apply impartial normative standards to their requests for help, account for the fairness of their requests, and consider the needs of others when requesting.

Prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. The role of responsibility and vulnerability

In two pre-registered and fully incentivized studies (N = 501), we investigate prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Based on a comparison with pre-pandemic data, Study 1 shows that individuals' general prosociality measured with a (context-independent) Social Value Orientation Slider changed significantly before vs. during the early stage of the pandemic towards increased prosociality. In addition, we identified pandemic-specific context factors for prosocial behavior measured by a series of Dictator games with different recipients. Allocations in the Dictator game increased with the giver's responsibility and the recipients' vulnerability to the virus. Study 2 replicates and extends this finding in a sample representative for the adult German population in terms of age and gender. We show that, for different actors (self, recipient, politicians), different dimensions of responsibility (responsibility to help, responsibility for the problem cause, and for the solution) are associated with prosocial behavior. Contrary to what could be expected from diffusion of responsibility, prosocial behavior increased not only when individuals themselves felt responsible to help but also when they perceived politicians to be responsible to help. Assigning responsibility for the cause of the COVID-19 crisis to recipients and politicians was associated with a decrease in prosocial behavior. However, responsibility for the solution had no influence. We discuss implications for public policies.

Altruistic Giving Toward Refugees: Identifying Factors That Increase Citizens' Willingness to Help

Over the past decade, the world has faced an unprecedented refugee crisis. The large number of incoming refugees represents a challenge for host societies and its citizens triggering reactions from a supportive welcome to brusque rejection and hostile behavior toward refugees. In a pre-registered study, we investigated factors that could promote altruistic behavior in fully incentivized one-shot Dictator Game toward various receiver groups including refugees. We find that host citizens behave more altruistically toward refugees and other receiver groups if they (a) share a local identity with them (i.e., live in the same city), and (b) perceive them to be close (to the self) and warm-hearted. Moreover, citizens that are (c) generally more prosocial and hold a more left-wing political orientation are more willing to give. Unexpectedly, from a theoretical point of view, altruistic giving toward refugees was not influenced in the predicted direction by a shared student identity, competition and perceived income differences (although the latter effect was significant when considering all receiver groups). For shared student identity we even observe a reduction of altruistic behavior, while the opposite effect was predicted. We discuss implications for public policies for successful refugee helping and integration.

Competence-based helping: Children's consideration of need when providing others with help

When and how other people's needs influence children's helping is poorly understood. Here we focused on whether children use information about other people's competence in their helping. In Study 1 (N = 128 4- to 8-year-old children), children could provide help to both an incompetent target and a competent target by pushing levers. Whereas older children helped incompetent targets more than competent targets, younger children (<5 years) helped both targets equally. Two further experiments (N = 20 and N = 28) revealed that 4-year-olds understood that the incompetent person needed more help and also understood how they could help. Thus, young children do not, like older children, give more help to those who need it the most. We discuss potential developmental changes toward competence-based helping.

Why do preschoolers perpetuate inequalities? Theoretical perspectives on inequity preferences in the face of emerging concerns for equality

Recent research has shown that preschool children tend to preferentially allocate resources to rich than to poor others. The findings that young children tend to perpetuate inequalities are puzzling given classical developmental theories that largely focused on the emergence of equality and equity in childhood. In this review, we first sketch the early ontogeny of fairness concerns before providing an overview on studies reporting perpetuation of inequality in young children. We review four classical theories (Piaget, Kohlberg, Damon, Social Domain Theory) and discuss how they would account for this phenomenon. We then introduce four recent theoretical models that directly speak to the underlying psychological processes; the affective preference model, the reciprocity-based strategic model, the numerical matching model, and the normative model. We highlight the key tenets of each model, their relation to other developmental processes, and the strength of the empirical evidence. From each model, we derive specific hypotheses. Finally, in an integrative section we discuss how the models might relate to each other, highlight connections to other research areas, and present avenues for future research.

Disengagement is as revealing as prosocial action for young children’s responding to strangers in distress: How personal distress and empathic concern come into play

In a paradigm of simulated stranger distress designed to elicit empathic arousal, this study examined multiple elements of responding in 61 preschoolers. Disengagement from stranger distress was underscored in addition to prosocial responding. All children encountered a female adult stranger feigning stomach ache followed by an infant manikin emitting cry sound in a bassinet. Behaviors were coded for other-oriented behaviors, personal distress, and disengagement. In contrast to the traditional supposition, behaviors indicative of personal distress covaried positively with empathic concern and negatively with disengagement. The findings of multiple regression analysis demonstrated how empathic concern and personal distress jointly related to disengaging behaviors in children’s response to stranger distress.