Toddlers prefer to help familiar people

Task demands matter in shaping how preschoolers express instrumental helping, comforting, and sharing: A longitudinal analysis

The current research provides a detailed longitudinal examination of instrumental helping, comforting, and sharing in early childhood. Preschoolers completed a series of prosocial behavior tasks when they were 2 years old (n = 200), 3 years old (n = 161), and 4 years old (n = 135). As expected, children's prosocial behaviors increased with age across all tasks. Yet children's prosocial behaviors were more nuanced than expected, with significant differences in scores between trials within each type of prosocial behavior. Cross-lagged panel modelling revealed that instrumental helping at 3 years predicted comforting when an experimenter was sad or cold at 4 years. Furthermore, children's comforting of a sad experimenter at 3 years predicted sharing their own toy with a sad experimenter at 4 years. These findings offer novel insights into the developmental trajectory of three types of prosocial behavior in early childhood.

Young children's adaptive partner choice in cooperation and competition contexts

Choosing adequate partners is essential for cooperation, but how children calibrate their partner choice to specific social challenges is unknown. In two experiments, 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 189, 49% girls, mostly White, data collection: 03.2021-09.2022) were presented with partners in possession of different positive qualities. Children then recruited partners for hypothetical tasks that differed with respect to the quality necessary for success. Children and the selected partner either worked together toward a common goal or competed against each other. From age 5, children selectively chose individuals in possession of task-relevant qualities as cooperative partners while avoiding them as competitors. Younger children chose partners indiscriminately. Children thus learn to strategically adjust their partner choice depending on context-specific task demands and different social goals.

Examining the influence of shyness on children's helping and comforting behaviour

Introduction

Shy children, who tend to feel anxious around others and withdraw from social interactions, are found to be less prosocial than their not-shy peers in some studies, though not in others. To examine the contexts in which shy children may be more or less likely to engage in prosocial behaviour, we compared children's willingness and ability to intervene during in-person tasks that differed in social engagement demands and complexity, factors that have been conflated in past research.

Methods

We presented 42, 3.5- to 4.5-year-old children with prosocial problems that varied, in a 2 x 2 within-subjects design, by the type of intervention required (i.e., simple helping or complex comforting) and the source of the problem (i.e., social: within the experimenter's personal space; or object: a target object distanced from her).

Results

Most of the children acted prosocially, with little prompting, in the two helping tasks and in the object-centered comforting task. In contrast, fewer than half of the children acted prosocially in the social-centered comforting task. Shyer children were not less likely to intervene in any of the four tasks, but they were slower to intervene in the object-centred comforting task, in which the experimenter was upset about a broken toy.

Discussion

Thus, providing social-centered comfort to a recently-introduced adult is challenging for young children, regardless of shyness, though shy children do show hesitancy with object-centered comforting. Further, these findings provide insights into the methodological challenges of disentangling children's prosocial motivation and understanding, and we propose solutions to these challenges for future research.

Young Children's Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot

Young children help others in a range of situations, relatively indiscriminate of the characteristics of those they help. Recent results have suggested that young children's helping behavior extends even to humanoid robots. However, it has been unclear how characteristics of robots would influence children's helping behavior. Considering previous findings suggesting that certain robot features influence adults' perception of and their behavior toward robots, the question arises of whether young children's behavior and perception would follow the same principles. The current study investigated whether two key characteristics of a humanoid robot (animate autonomy and friendly expressiveness) would affect children's instrumental helping behavior and their perception of the robot as an animate being. Eighty-two 3-year-old children participated in one of four experimental conditions manipulating a robot's ostensible animate autonomy (high/low) and friendly expressiveness (friendly/neutral). Helping was assessed in an out-of-reach task and animacy ratings were assessed in a post-test interview. Results suggested that both children's helping behavior, as well as their perception of the robot as animate, were unaffected by the robot's characteristics. The findings indicate that young children's helping behavior extends largely indiscriminately across two important characteristics. These results increase our understanding of the development of children's altruistic behavior and animate-inanimate distinctions. Our findings also raise important ethical questions for the field of child-robot interaction.

Toddlers' intrinsic motivation to return help to their benefactor

A natural reaction to receiving help from someone is to help that person in return. In two studies, we investigated the developmental origins of children's motivation to return help. In Study 1, 18- and 24-month-old toddlers were either helped or not helped by an adult, and they could subsequently provide that adult with help or else observe another person providing help. We measured children's internal arousal, via changes in pupil dilation, both before and after help was provided. At both ages, children's internal arousal was higher when they could not help the adult who had previously helped them (and was lower when they could). On the other hand, if the adult needing help had not previously helped children, their internal arousal was equally low regardless of whether they or another person provided the help. Study 2 replicated this result and also found that if children had previously been helped but the person needing help was a different adult (not their benefactor), children's internal arousal was equally low regardless of whether they or another person provided the help. Together, these results suggest that young children are intrinsically motivated to return a received favor specifically to the previous benefactor, perhaps indicating a nascent sense of gratitude.