Children are eager to take credit for prosocial acts, and cost affects this tendency

We report two experiments on children's tendency to enhance their reputations through communicative acts. In the experiments, 4-year-olds (N = 120) had the opportunity to inform a social partner that they had helped him in his absence. In a first experiment, we pitted a prosocial act ("Let's help clean up for Doggie!") against an instrumental act ("Let's move these out of our way"). Children in the prosocial condition were quicker to inform their partner of the act and more likely to protest when another individual was given credit for it. In a second experiment, we replicated the prosocial condition but with a new manipulation: high-cost versus low-cost helping. We manipulated both the language surrounding cost (i.e., "This will be pretty tough to clean up" vs. "It will be really easy to clean this up") and how difficult the task itself was. As predicted, children in the high-cost condition were quicker to inform their partner of the act and more likely to take back credit for it. These results suggest that even 4-year-old children make active attempts to elicit positive reputational judgments for their prosocial acts, with cost as a moderating factor.