Insight into toddlers' motivation to help: From social participants to prosocial contributors

What drives toddlers' helping behavior? And do toddlers' helping motivations change across time? In line with Dahl and Paulus (2019), we propose that initially, toddlers start helping in ongoing chores driven by their interest in social interactions, and, later on, their helping becomes more concern based, or based on a sense of responsibility. To test this assumption, we used a longitudinal approach to examine the role that social interaction plays in toddlers' motivation to help as they grow older. As such, we investigated whether a disruption to an experimenter during a shared chore task affected toddlers' motivations to continue helping at the ages of 18, 21 and 24 months. Results showed that toddlers at 18 months were less likely to continue helping when the experimenter was disrupted from the shared task, in comparison to toddlers at 21 and at 24 months. These findings support the idea that toddlers develop from socially based participators into more prosocially based contributors.