3-078 - Children's Reasoning about the Costs and Rewards of Prosocial Decisions

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Humans are motivated to help others even in infancy (Tomasello, 2009). Yet, helping is complex: there are many ways to help, with varying consequences for the direct recipient and beyond. Thus, it is often important to not only consider the helpee’s utilities (costs and rewards) but also the utilities for the self (the helper) and others who might be impacted. In this symposium, four studies explore how children reason about their own and others’ utilities, and how this ability influences their prosocial decisions.

Paper 1 suggests children (5-year-olds) maximize utilities (increase rewards and decrease costs) when making temporal-discounting decisions for themselves and others but incur greater costs for self-benefiting than other-benefiting actions. Paper 2 demonstrates that though children (5-7-year-olds) maximize their own utilities in self-serving (“playing”) decisions, they estimate others’ expected costs and rewards and prioritize others’ utilities in prosocial (“teaching”) decisions. Paper 3 suggests that although children (3-year-olds) consider the recipient’s costs and rewards to decide how to help, they fail to consider the potential costs to a third party. However, Paper 4 indicates that when a third party’s preferences are made explicit, 3-year-olds do consider her costs and resist requests conflicting with her desires.

These papers shed light on what considerations inform adult intuitions about prosocial decisions and how these intuitions develop in early childhood. By bringing these findings together, this symposium will advance our understanding of prosociality as a decision-making process, suggesting that the ability to reason about costs and rewards might support and constrain this process.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chairs

• Sophie Bridgers, Stanford University

• Hyowon Gweon, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Children Weigh the Cost and Rewards in Altruistic Decision-making - Presenting Author: Shari Liu, Harvard University; Gorana Gonzalez, Boston College; Felix Warneken, Harvard University

• Children Consider Others’ Expected Costs and Rewards When Deciding What to Teach - Presenting Author: Sophie Bridgers, Stanford University; Julian Jara-Ettinger, MIT; Hyowon Gweon, Stanford University

• Paternalistic Helping: Do Children Weigh the Costs and Benefits of Fulfilling Others’ Stated Goals? - Presenting Author: Alia Martin, Victoria University of Wellington; Kristina Olson, University of Washington

• Preschoolers’ Consideration for how Helping One Person Impacts Third Parties - Presenting Author: Jonathan S Beier, University of Maryland, College Park; Brandon Frank Terrizzi, University of Maryland, College Park; Amanda Mae Woodward, University of Maryland, College Park