The animals in moral tales: Does character realism influence children's prosocial response to stories?

Previous research has suggested that moral stories depicting realistic characters may better facilitate children's prosocial behavior than those containing anthropomorphized animal characters. The current study is a conceptual replication with a different sample and an extended age range. We examined the relationships among story character realism (anthropomorphized animal or human), theme (sharing or busyness), age, and prosocial behavior (i.e., resource allocation). Four versions of an illustrated storybook were created: an Animal Sharing book, an Animal Busy book, a Human Sharing book, and a Human Busy book. A total of 179 children aged 3-7 years listened to one of the four versions of the story. Children's sticker donating behavior was measured prior to hearing the story and again following a story recall task. All groups donated more stickers post-story than pre-story. Younger children were more likely to increase their donation than older children, and children who had made higher human internal state attributions in a previous experimental session donated more stickers post-story. In contrast to previous research, we found that a sharing-themed narrative depicting human characters was no more influential for sticker donation than the other stories.