Helpers or halos: examining the evaluative mechanisms underlying selective prosociality.

This research examines the proximate evaluative mechanisms underlying prosocial partner choice-based reciprocity. Across four studies we presented 855 university undergraduates (online for course credit) and 76 4- to 6-year-olds (offline at a university laboratory) with vignettes describing prosocial, social and non-social characters, and asked participants about their person preferences in prosocial, social and general contexts. Adults demonstrated sophisticated appraisals, coordinating between relevant trait and contextual cues to make selections. Adults were particularly attentive to prosocial cues in costly conditions, suggesting that they were using dispositional attributions to make their selections. By contrast, children were largely unable to integrate trait and contextual cues in determining their partner preferences, instead displaying valenced preferences for non-social cues, suggesting the use of affective tagging. Together, these studies demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying prosocial, partner choice-based reciprocity are not early emerging and stable but show considerable development over the lifespan.

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.

Bilingual children judge moral, social, and language violations as less transgressive than monolingual children.

Learning the rules and expectations that govern our social interactions is one of the major challenges of development. The current study examined whether bilingualism is associated with differences in children's developing social knowledge. We presented 54 4- to 6-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with vignettes of moral transgressions (e.g., hitting), social transgressions (e.g., wearing pants on one's head), and language transgressions (e.g., calling a common object by a nonsense word) and asked about their permissibility. In line with previous research findings, results demonstrate that all children evaluated moral violations more harshly than conventional violations. Notably, however, bilingual children were more permissive of violations across moral, social, and language domains than monolingual children. These findings yield new insights into the role of early experience in the development of social knowledge. We propose that bilinguals' unique linguistic and social experiences influence their understanding of moral and conventional rules.

Motivating Moral Behavior: Helping, Sharing, and Comforting in Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This exploratory study examined the role of social-cognitive development in the production of moral behavior. Specifically, we explored the propensity of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to engage in helping, sharing, and comforting acts, addressing two specific questions: (1) Compared to their typically developing (TD) peers, how do young children with ASD perform on three prosocial tasks that require the recognition of different kinds of need (instrumental, material, and emotional), and (2) are children with ASD adept at distinguishing situations in which an adult needs assistance from perceptually similar situations in which the need is absent? Children with ASD demonstrated low levels of helping and sharing but provided comfort at levels consistent with their TD peers. Children with ASD also tended to differentiate situations where a need was present from situations in which it was absent. Together, these results provided an initial demonstration that young children with ASD have the ability to take another's perspective and represent their internal need states. However, when the cost of engaging in prosocial behavior is high (e.g., helping and sharing), children with ASD may be less inclined to engage in the behavior, suggesting that both the capacity to recognize another's need and the motivation to act on behalf of another appear to play important roles in the production of prosocial behavior. Further, differential responding on the helping, sharing, and comforting tasks lend support to current proposals that the domain of moral behavior is comprised of a variety of distinct subtypes of prosocial behavior.

Getting help for others: An examination of indirect helping in young children.

When young children recruit others to help a person in need, media reports often treat it as a remarkable event. Yet it is unclear how commonly children perform this type of pro-social behavior and what forms of social understanding, cognitive abilities, and motivational factors promote or discourage it. In this study, 48 three- to four-year-old children could choose between two actors to retrieve an out-of-reach object for a third person; during this event, one actor was physically unable to provide help. Nearly all of children's responses appropriately incorporated the actors' action capacities, indicating that rational prosocial reasoning-the cognitive basis for effective indirect helping-is common at this young age. However, only half of children actually directed an actor to help, suggesting that additional motivational factors constrained their prosocial actions. A behavioral measure of social inhibition and within-task scaffolding that increased children's personal involvement were both strongly associated with children's initiation of indirect helping behavior. These results highlight social inhibition and recognizing one's own potential agency as key motivational challenges that children must overcome to recruit help for others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Variability in social reasoning: the influence of attachment security on the attribution of goals.

Over the last half decade there has been a growing move to apply the methods and theory of cognitive development to questions regarding infants' social understanding. Though this combination has afforded exciting opportunities to better understand our species' unique social cognitive abilities, the resulting findings do not always lead to the same conclusions. For example, a growing body of research has found support for both universal similarity and individual differences in infants' social reasoning about others' responses to incomplete goals. The present research examines this apparent contradiction by assessing the influence of attachment security on the ability of university undergraduates to represent instrumental needs versus social-emotional distress. When the two varieties of goals were clearly differentiated, we observed a universally similar pattern of results (Experiments 1A/B). However, when the goals were combined, and both instrumental need and social-emotional distress were presented together, individual differences emerged (Experiments 2 and 3). Taken together, these results demonstrate that by integrating the two perspectives of shared universals and individual differences, important points of contact can be revealed supporting a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the nature of human social reasoning.

A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharing, and comforting subtypes.

The development and maintenance of prosocial, other-oriented behaviors has been of considerable recent interest. Though it is clear that prosocial behaviors emerge early and play a uniquely important role in the social lives of humans, there is less consensus regarding the mechanisms that underlie and maintain these fundamental acts. The goal of this paper is to clarify inconsistencies in our understanding of the early emergence and development of prosocial behavior by proposing a taxonomy of prosocial behavior anchored in the social-cognitive constraints that underlie the ability to act on behalf of others. I will argue that within the general domain of prosocial behavior, other-oriented actions can be categorized into three distinct types (helping, sharing, and comforting) that reflect responses to three distinct negative states (instrumental need, unmet material desire, and emotional distress). In support of this proposal, I will demonstrate that the three varieties of prosocial behavior show unique ages of onset, uncorrelated patterns of production, and distinct patterns of individual differences. Importantly, by differentiating specific varieties of prosocial behavior within the general category, we can begin to explain inconsistencies in the past literature and provide a framework for directing future research into the ontogenetic origins of these essential social behaviors.

Selectivity in early prosocial behavior.

Prosocial behavior requires expenditure of personal resources for the benefit of others, a fact that creates a "problem" when considering the evolution of prosociality. Models that address this problem have been developed, with emphasis typically placed on reciprocity. One model considers the advantages of being selective in terms of one's allocation of prosocial behavior so as to improve the chance that one will be benefitted in return. In this review paper, we first summarize this "partner choice" model and then focus on prosocial development in the preschool years, where we make the case for selective partner choice in early instances of human prosocial behavior.

Children's use of communicative intent in the selection of cooperative partners.

Within the animal kingdom, human cooperation represents an outlier. As such, there has been great interest across a number of fields in identifying the factors that support the complex and flexible variety of cooperation that is uniquely human. The ability to identify and preferentially interact with better social partners (partner choice) is proposed to be a major factor in maintaining costly cooperation between individuals. Here we show that the ability to engage in flexible and effective partner choice behavior can be traced back to early childhood. Specifically, across two studies, we demonstrate that by 3 years of age, children identify effective communication as "helpful" (Experiments 1 & 2), reward good communicators with information (Experiment 1), and selectively reciprocate communication with diverse cooperative acts (Experiment 2). Taken together, these results suggest that even in early childhood, humans take advantage of cooperative benefits, while mitigating free-rider risks, through appropriate partner choice behavior.

Evidence for partner choice in toddlers: considering the breadth of other-oriented behaviours.

When do humans become moral beings? This commentary draws on developmental psychology theory to expand the understanding of early moral behaviours. We argue that by looking at a broader range of other-oriented acts than what has been considered by Baumard et al., we can find support for the mutualistic approach to morality even in early instances of other-oriented behaviours.

Classifying prosocial behavior: children's responses to instrumental need, emotional distress, and material desire.

This study investigates the diversity of early prosocial behavior by examining the ability of ninety-five 2- to 4-year-olds to provide aid to an adult experimenter displaying instrumental need, emotional distress, and material desire. Children provided appropriate aid in response to each of these cues with high consistency over multiple trials. In contrast to the consistency with which the children provided aid within each task, there were no cross-task correlations, and the tendency to respond to each of the cues revealed unique developmental trajectories. Taken together, these results provide preliminary support for the importance of examining the cues to which children are responding and of differentiating between varieties of aid when considering the development of prosocial behavior.

The development of children's information gathering: to look or to ask?

The testimony of others and direct experience play a major role in the development of children's knowledge. Children actively use questions to seek others' testimony and explore the environment. It is unclear though whether children distinguish when it is better to ask from when it is better to try to find an answer by oneself. In 2 experiments, we examined the ability of 4- and 6-year-olds to select between looking and asking to determine visible and invisible properties of entities (e.g., hair color vs. knowledge of French). All children chose to look more often for visible than invisible properties. However, only 6-year-olds chose above chance to look for visible properties and to ask for invisible properties. Four-year-olds showed a preference for looking in one experiment and asking in the other. The results suggest substantial development in the efficacy of children's learning in early childhood.

Selective information seeking after a single encounter.

In 3 experiments, the authors examined whether a single act of testimony can inform children's subsequent information seeking. In Experiment 1, participants saw one informant give a correct and another informant give an incorrect answer to a question, assessed who was right (wrong), and decided to whom to address a 2nd question. Adults and 7-year-olds but not 4-year-olds selected the previously correct informant. In Experiment 2, after assessing which informant was (not) very good at answering, even 4-year-olds selected the previously correct informant. In Experiment 3, in the absence of external demands to evaluate the informants, 7-year-olds and adults still selected the previously correct informant. Thus, a single encounter is sufficient for 7-year-olds and adults to engage in selective information seeking and trait labels enable 4-year-olds to do so too.

Intention-mediated selective helping in infancy.

One way to maintain cooperation between unrelated individuals and decrease the chance of providing costly aid to those who will not reciprocate is by selectively helping on the basis of the content of previous interactions. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the earliest instances of human helping behavior show specificity. In three experiments, we found that infants preferred to help an individual who, in a previous interaction, intended to provide a toy over one who did not (Experiment 1) and that infants consider this positive intention even without a positive outcome (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 provided a more detailed examination of the basis of selection, suggesting that infants are not solely avoiding unwilling individuals, but also selectively helping those who have shown a willingness to provide. Taken together, these experiments indicate that early helping behaviors show characteristics of the rich reciprocal relationships observed in adult prosocial behavior.