Early prosocial development across cultures

Young dictators-Speaking about oneself decreases generosity in children from two cultural contexts

Sharing of resources is a common feature of human societies. Yet, there is substantial societal variation in children's generosity, and this variation emerges during middle childhood. Societal differences in self-construal orientation may be one factor influencing the ontogeny of generosity. Here, we examine anonymous Dictator Game sharing in 7-and-8-year-olds from two distinct societies: India and the UK (N = 180). We used self-construal manipulations to investigate whether priming self- or other-focused conversations would differentially influence children's generosity. There were no differences in generosity between populations. While a significant reduction in generosity was found following self-priming in both societies, other-priming was ineffectual. The findings are discussed in relation to experimental features and the role of anonymity and reputational concerns.

The proximate regulation of prosocial behaviour: towards a conceptual framework for comparative research

Humans and many other animal species act in ways that benefit others. Such prosocial behaviour has been studied extensively across a range of disciplines over the last decades, but findings to date have led to conflicting conclusions about prosociality across and even within species. Here, we present a conceptual framework to study the proximate regulation of prosocial behaviour in humans, non-human primates and potentially other animals. We build on psychological definitions of prosociality and spell out three key features that need to be in place for behaviour to count as prosocial: benefitting others, intentionality, and voluntariness. We then apply this framework to review observational and experimental studies on sharing behaviour and targeted helping in human children and non-human primates. We show that behaviours that are usually subsumed under the same terminology (e.g. helping) can differ substantially across and within species and that some of them do not fulfil our criteria for prosociality. Our framework allows for precise mapping of prosocial behaviours when retrospectively evaluating studies and offers guidelines for future comparative work.

No Signs of Inclusive Fitness or Reciprocal Altruism in Advantageous Inequity Aversion

Advantageous inequity aversion (i.e., the tendency to respond negatively to unfairness that benefits oneself) usually develops in 6-8-year-olds. However, little is known about the selection pressures that might have shaped this phenomenon. Using data collected from 120 4-8-year-old Finnish children, we tested two evolutionary explanations for the development of advantageous inequity aversion: reciprocal altruism (i.e., benefiting from sharing when the roles are likely reversed in the future) and inclusive fitness (i.e., benefiting from sharing with biological relatives that carry the same alleles). We first successfully replicated a previous experiment, showing that 6-8-year-olds display advantageous inequity aversion by preferring to throw away a resource rather than keep it for themselves. Here, this behavior was also displayed in 5-year-olds. Using a novel experiment, we then asked children to distribute five erasers between themselves, a sibling, a peer, and a stranger. That is, an equal distribution was only possible if throwing away one eraser. We found no support for advantageous inequity aversion being shaped by either inclusive fitness or reciprocal altruism. Future studies could investigate costly signaling and adherence to social norms to avoid negative consequences as ultimate explanations for advantageous inequity aversion.

Variations in limited resources allocation towards friends and strangers in children and adolescents from seven economically and culturally diverse societies

Humans are unique among primates in altruism and sharing limited recourses towards non-kin. Our study revealed the differences in proportions of individuals ready to share limited resources with virtual friend compared to virtual stranger in children and adolescents from seven ethnic groups, represented by four traditional rural African societies from Tanzania with different types of economy and three societies from Russia. The study was conducted between 2015 and 2020, and the data on 2253 individuals (1104 males and 1149 females) were obtained. Six economic games with limited resource allocations were conducted: Prosocial, Envy, and Sharing games with imagined friends and stranger partners accordingly. All players were later classified according to their decisions in all six games into four behavioral types: egoistic, egalitarian, altruistic, and mixed. The effects of population origin, gender, age, and stranger/friend type of interaction on the behavior were estimated by multinomial logistic regression. It was demonstrated that more respondents prefer altruistic and egalitarian behavior than egoistic and mixed in the whole sample. However, significant parochial effect was found. The study revealed significant main effects of ethnicity, age, and the interaction effects of ethnicity and parochial tendencies, and ethnicity and age on the behavior of players.

Fairness takes time: Development of cooperative decision making in fairness context

The current study examined the development of fairness behavior and tested whether children's fair choices are fast and intuitive or slow and deliberate. Reaction times were measured while 4- to 9-year-olds (N = 94, 49 girls, 84.6% White) completed a novel social decision-making task contrasting fair choices with selfish choices. Fairness behavior increased during childhood, shifting from predominantly selfish choices among young children to fair choices by 7 years of age. Moreover, young children's fair choices were slow and deliberate, whereas reaction times did not predict older children's choices. These findings contrast with adults' intuitive cooperation and point to protracted development and learning of cooperative decision making in fairness contexts.

Focus on One or More? Cultural Similarities and Differences in How Parents Talk About Social Events to Preschool Children

How parents talk about social events shapes their children's understanding of the social world and themselves. In this study, we show that parents in a society that more strongly values individualism (the United States) and one that more strongly values collectivism (Japan) differ in how they talk about negative social events, but not positive ones. An animal puppet show presented positive social events (e.g., giving a gift) and negative social events (e.g., knocking over another puppet's block tower). All shows contained two puppets, an actor and a recipient of the event. We asked parents to talk to their 3- and 4-years old children about these events. A total of 26 parent-child dyads from the United States (M = 41.92 months) and Japan (M = 42.77 months) participated. The principal dependent measure was how much parent talk referred to the actor of each type of social event. There were no cultural differences observed in positive events - both the United States and Japanese parents discussed actors more than recipients. However, there were cultural differences observed in negative events - the United States parents talked mostly about the actor but Japanese parents talked equally about the actor and the recipient of the event. The potential influences of these differences on early cognitive and social development are discussed.

How Yucatec Maya Children Learn to Help at Home

Children’s household contributions have been studied across cultural communities, mostly on the basis of maternal reports. Less is known about children’s views of their contributions. This study examines Yucatec Maya children’s ethnotheories of learning to help at home and their motivation for helping. We interviewed 38 7- to 11-year-old children in two communities in the Yucatán Peninsula, México. Children in both communities contributed substantially to their families by regularly taking the initiative to help with family work. Children explained that they like to help and that helping is a shared responsibility among family members. Children’s sense of belonging and responsibility to the family seemed to be the driving forces in their contributions, as they pay attention to the needs of the family and take the initiative to learn and help. These findings demonstrate the relevance of studying children’s ethnotheories to understand cultural variations on learning to help at home.

Adolescents' Bipolar Experiences and Suicide Risk: Well-being and Mental Health Difficulties as Mediators

Bipolar disorder is usually accompanied by a high suicide risk. The main aim was to identify the risk and protective factors involved in suicide risk in adolescents with bipolar experiences. Of a total of 1506 adolescents, 467 (31%) were included in the group reporting bipolar experiences or symptoms, 214 males (45.8%) and 253 (54.2%) females. The mean age was 16.22 (SD = 1.36), with the age range between 14 and 19. Suicide risk, behavioral and emotional difficulties, prosocial capacities, well-being, and bipolar experiences were assessed through self-report. Mediation analyses, taking gender as a moderator and controlling age as a covariate, were applied to estimate suicide risk. The results indicated that the effect of bipolar experiences on suicide risk is mediated by behavioral and emotional difficulties rather than by prosocial behavior and subjective well-being. Specifically, emotional problems, problems with peers, behavior problems, and difficulties associated with hyperactivity were the most important variables. This relationship was not modulated by gender. However, the indirect effects of some mediators varied according to gender. These results support the development of suicide risk prevention strategies focused on reducing emotional difficulties, behavioral problems, and difficulties in relationships with others.

Toddlers' costly helping in three societies

Over the second and third years of life, toddlers begin to engage in helping even when it comes at a personal cost. During this same period, toddlers gain experience of ownership, which may influence their tendency to help at a cost. Whereas costly helping has been studied in Western children, who have ample access to resources, the emergence of costly helping has not been examined in societies where children's experience with ownership is varied and access to resources is scarce. The current study compared the development of toddlers' costly and non-costly helping in three societies within Canada, India, and Peru that differ in these aspects of children's early social experience. In two conditions, 16- to 36-month-olds (N = 100) helped an experimenter by giving either their own items (Costly condition) or the experimenter's items (Non-costly condition). Children's tendency to help increased with age in the Non-costly condition across all three societies. In the Costly condition, in Canada children's tendency to help increased with age, in Peru children's helping remained stable across age, and in India children's level of helping decreased with age. Thus, whereas we replicate the findings that non-costly helping appears to develop synchronously across diverse societies, costly helping may depend on children's early society-specific experiences. We discuss these findings in relation to children's early ownership experience and access to resources, factors that may account for the divergent patterns in the development of costly helping across these societies.

Beyond Behavior: Linguistic Evidence of Cultural Variation in Parental Ethnotheories of Children's Prosocial Helping

This study examined linguistic patterns in mothers' reports about their toddlers' involvement in everyday household work, as a way to understand the parental ethnotheories that may guide children's prosocial helping and development. Mothers from two cultural groups - US Mexican-heritage families with backgrounds in indigenous American communities and middle-class European-American families - were interviewed regarding how their 2- to 3-year-old toddler gets involved in help with everyday household work. The study's analytic focus was the linguistic form of mothers' responses to interview questions asking about the child's efforts to help with a variety of everyday household work tasks. Results showed that mothers responded with linguistic patterns that were indicative of ethnotheoretical assumptions regarding children's agency and children's prosocial intentions, with notable contrasts between the two cultural groups. Nearly all US Mexican-heritage mothers reported children's contributions and participation using linguistic forms that centered children's agency and prosocial initiative, which corresponds with extensive evidence suggesting the centrality of both children's autonomy and supportive prosocial expectations in how children's helpfulness is socialized in this and similar cultural communities. By contrast, middle-class European-American mothers frequently responded to questions about their child's efforts to help with linguistic forms that "pivoted" to either the mother as the focal agent in the child's prosocial engagement or to reframing the child's involvement to emphasize non-help activities. Correspondence between cultural differences in the linguistic findings and existing literature on socialization of children's prosocial helping is discussed. Also discussed is the analytic approach of the study, uncommon in developmental psychology research, and the significance of the linguistic findings for understanding parental ethnotheories in each community.

Helping, fast and slow: Exploring intuitive cooperation in early ontogeny

Cooperative behavior is central to human societies. Human adults who reach their cooperative decisions more rapidly and independently of cognitive control display greater levels of prosocial behavior. This is taken to show that cooperation is guided by intuitive processes rather than by active control of selfish impulses. The current study investigated the emergence of intuitive cooperation in early human ontogeny. We measured helping behavior (latency and frequency) in a longitudinal sample of infants at ages 14 and 18 months. Between 14 and 18 months, the frequency of helping significantly increased and latency to help significantly decreased, suggesting advances in helping behavior during this period of development. Moreover, at 18 months and to some extent, even at 14 months, infants who helped more rapidly (as indexed by a shorter latency) acted more prosocially (as indexed by a greater frequency of helping) than infants who were slower to help. This link between latency and frequency of prosocial behavior was independent of infants' ability for inhibitory control and general sociability levels. Prosocial behavior thus begins to be governed by intuitive processes that operate independently of cognitive control early in human ontogeny. This informs our understanding of the nature and emergence of cooperative behavior by supporting accounts that assign a central role to intuition in the evolution of human cooperation.

Considering self or others across two cultural contexts: How children's resource allocation is affected by self-construal manipulations

Most humans share to some degree. Yet, from middle childhood, sharing behavior varies substantially across societies. Here, for the first time, we explored the effect of self-construal manipulation on sharing decisions in 7- and 8-year-old children from two distinct societies: urban India and urban United Kingdom. Children participated in one of three conditions that focused attention on independence, interdependence, or a control. Sharing was then assessed across three resource allocation games. A focus on independence resulted in reduced generosity in both societies. However, an intriguing societal difference emerged following a focus on interdependence, where only Indian children from traditional extended families displayed greater generosity in one of the resource allocation games. Thus, a focus on independence can move children from diverse societies toward selfishness with relative ease, but a focus on interdependence is very limited in its effectiveness to promote generosity.

The Development of Prosocial Attention Across Two Cultures

Despite the significance of prosocial attention for understanding variability in children's prosociality little is known about its expression beyond infancy and outside the Western cultural context. In the current study we asked whether children's sensitivity to others' needs varies across ages and between a Western and Non-Western cultural group. We carried out a cross-cultural and cross-sectional eye tracking study in Kenya (n = 128) and Germany (n = 83) with children between the ages of 3 to 9 years old. Half the children were presented with videos depicting an instrumental helping situation in which one adult reached for an object while a second adult resolved or did not resolve the need. The second half of children watched perceptually controlled non-social control videos in which objects moved without any adults present. German children looked longer at the videos than Kenyan children who in turn looked longer at the non-social compared to the social videos. At the same time, children in both cultures and across all age groups anticipated the relevant solution to the instrumental problem in the social but not in the non-social control condition. We did not find systematic changes in children's pupil dilation in response to seeing the problem occur or in response to the resolution of the situation. These findings suggest that children's anticipation of how others' needs are best resolved is a cross-cultural phenomenon that persists throughout childhood.

Neurometabolic and functional connectivity basis of prosocial behavior in early adolescence

Human prosocial behavior (PB) emerges in childhood and matures during adolescence. Previous task-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have reported involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in social cognition in adolescence. However, neurometabolic and functional connectivity (FC) basis of PB in early adolescence remains unclear. Here, we measured GABA levels in the ACC and FC in a subsample (aged 10.5–13.4 years) of a large-scale population-based cohort with MR spectroscopy (MEGA-PRESS) and resting-state fMRI. PB was negatively correlated with GABA levels in the ACC (N = 221), and positively correlated with right ACC-seeded FC with the right precentral gyrus and the bilateral middle and posterior cingulate gyrus (N = 187). Furthermore, GABA concentrations and this FC were negatively correlated, and the FC mediated the association between GABA levels and PB (N = 171). Our results from a minimally biased, large-scale sample provide new insights into the neurometabolic and neurofunctional correlates of prosocial development during early adolescence.

The developmental origins of moral concern: An examination of moral boundary decision making throughout childhood

Prominent theorists have made the argument that modern humans express moral concern for a greater number of entities than at any other time in our past. Moreover, adults show stable patterns in the degrees of concern they afford certain entities over others, yet it remains unknown when and how these patterns of moral decision-making manifest in development. Children aged 4 to 10 years (N = 151) placed 24 pictures of human, animal, and environmental entities on a stratified circle representing three levels of moral concern. Although younger and older children expressed similar overall levels of moral concern, older children demonstrated a more graded understanding of concern by including more entities within the outer reaches of their moral circles (i.e., they were less likely to view moral inclusion as a simple in vs. out binary decision). With age children extended greater concern to humans than other forms of life, and more concern to vulnerable groups, such as the sick and disabled. Notably, children's level of concern for human entities predicted their prosocial behavior. The current research provides novel insights into the development of our moral reasoning and its structure within childhood.