Varieties of young children’s prosocial behavior in Zambia

• In Event: 3-073 - Community Effects on Children’s Interests, Behaviors, and Beliefs

Integrative Statement

By the third year of life, young children engage in a variety of prosocial behaviors, including helping others attain their goals (instrumental helping), responding to others’ emotional needs (comforting), and sharing resources (costly giving). Recent work suggests that these behaviors comprise separate constructs, appear at different rates in early childhood, and are underpinned by different socio-cognitive motivations (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2013). To date, however, work investigating early varieties of prosocial behavior has largely focused on Western samples and has not assessed the impact of poverty and inequality. In this work, we investigate prosocial behavior in 3-year-olds in Zambia, a lower-middle income country with high wealth inequality. Experiments were integrated into a larger public health study along with both objective and subjective (parent) measures of wealth and inequality.

Three-hundred-seventy-seven children (Mean age= 36.77 months; SD= 2.26 months) were presented with a) an instrumental helping task (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006), in which toddlers watched an adult struggle to retrieve an out-of-reach object; b) a comforting task (Svetlova, 2010), in which toddlers watched an adult show distress about a broken object (while the child had a non-broken duplicate) and c) two steps of a sharing task (Chernyak & Kushnir, 2013) – one with higher cost (children could give away their only resource) and one with lower cost (children had 3 resources to give) to a stuffed doll that also wanted the resources.

As is the case in Western samples, the rates of prosociality varied hierarchically by the cost of the action: instrumental helping was the most common followed by comforting, lower cost giving, and higher cost giving. See Figure 1 for rates of each behavior type. Additionally, all prosocial behaviors were significantly correlated with one another (with the exception of high cost giving), and also correlated with general cognitive ability. That is, children with higher cognitive ability were also more likely to show each type of behavior.

We also explored how demographic variables influenced prosociality. Objective family wealth did not predict any of the child’s prosocial behaviors. However, subjective beliefs showed that mothers who believed that they had more than others in their village had children who were more likely to engage in instrumental helping, and mothers who believed that village inequality was a problem had children who were more likely to engage in low cost giving. Low cost giving was also more likely for children whose parents reported reading storybooks to them. This suggests that costly giving in the context of pretend play may relate to children’s experience with using stories as representations of real life events. The results suggest both cultural differences and universalities in the development of prosociality and point to psycho-social factors that influence prosociality. We discuss these results in light of debates on cultural universalities, cultural differences, and cultural mechanisms in the onset of early prosocial behavior.

Authors

• Nadia Chernyak, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Teresa Harvey, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amanda Tarullo, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Peter C Rockers, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Peter R Blake, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author