1-109 - Strategic considerations or genuine concern? Investigating the motivations underlying prosocial behavior in preschoolers

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

While it has been established that children behave prosocially, there is ongoing debate about the underlying motivations and their change over development. Children may act prosocially out of concern for others, or to reap strategic benefits. This symposium explores the relationship between prosocial and self-serving motivations underlying prosocial behavior across childhood.
Speaker 1 investigates one of the most basic forms of strategic interactions: reciprocity. This speaker shows that from the age of 5 onwards children increase their sharing behavior strategically in the presence of opportunities for reciprocity. Speaker 2 extends this finding by exploring how reputation management and vicarious reward influence 4- and 6-year-old children’s generosity. Results show that children are most generous when they can both appear generous to others and witness the happiness of a beneficiary. While both Speakers 1 and 2 highlight strategic considerations, Speaker 3 investigates whether children’s behavior is fully reducible to such concerns. Results demonstrate that 5-year-old children are willing to do the right thing even at the cost of strategic benefits. This suggests that children’s prosociality extends beyond strategic concerns and raises the question about how children develop more genuine motivations. Speaker 4 investigates one factor involved in this development: experience with making prosocial choices. In this study, children that made a proportionally more prosocial choice in a first step were significantly more likely to show subsequent generosity.
These findings suggest that children’s prosocial behavior is not motivated exclusively by either strategic considerations or genuine concerns – but by a complex interplay of both.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Jan Engelmann, Max Planck Institute

Individual Presentations

• Do ut des: The development of future-oriented reciprocity - Presenting Author: Felix Warneken, Harvard University; Carla Sebastian-Enesco, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

• To See or Be Seen?: Motivations Underlying Generosity - Presenting Author: Anne Fast, Univ of Washington; Sylvia A. Morelli, Stanford University; Jamil Zaki, Stanford University; Monica Cook, University of Washington; Kristina R Olson, University of Washington

• Young children do the right thing even if their peers do not - Presenting Author: Jan Engelmann, Max Planck Institute; Esther Herrmann, Max Planck Institute; Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute

• Preschoolers generous sharing is influenced by prior experience with proportional generosity - Presenting Author: Nadia Chernyak, Brown University; Bertilia Y. Trieu, Cornell University; Tamar Kushnir, Cornell University