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Is young children's helping affected by helpees' need? Preschoolers, but not infants selectively help needy others
1Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany. markus.paulus@lmu.de.
Insights
Young children
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Cognitive development
- Social cognition
Background:
- Infants and toddlers demonstrate instrumental helping, assisting others toward action-based goals.
- The psychological mechanisms driving early helping behavior are not fully understood and are subject to ongoing debate.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if the need of others influences instrumental helping in young children.
- To explore developmental differences in children's responsiveness to need during helping tasks.
Main Methods:
- A comparative study involving 1.5-year-old and 3.5-year-old children (n=101).
- Children were presented with simultaneous helping opportunities involving both a needy and a non-needy individual.
- A variety of instrumental helping tasks were employed to assess behavior.
Main Results:
- 3.5-year-old children showed a preference for helping the needy individual.
- 1.5-year-old children did not exhibit a preferential helping behavior based on need.
- This indicates developmental shifts in the factors influencing children's helping.
Conclusions:
- Early instrumental helping undergoes developmental changes in the initial years of life.
- Helping behavior gradually evolves into an other-oriented and need-based action.
- Findings support a developmental model of the emergence of altruistic helping.
Abstract:
Infants and toddlers engage in instrumental helping, that is, help others in achieving an action-based goal. The underlying psychological mechanisms are unclear and hotly debated. The present study examined whether young children's helping is affected by others' need. To this end, 1.5- and 3.5-year-old children (n = 101) were simultaneously confronted with a needy and a non-needy other in a variety of helping tasks. The results show that the 3.5-year-old, but not the 1.5-year-old children preferentially helped the needy person. This suggests developmental changes in the psychological mechanisms underlying early instrumental helping. The results are explained by a developmental account according to which helping only gradually becomes an other-oriented and need-based behavior in the first years of life.