Poster #195 - How relative need influences children’s helping behavior

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Children are helpful from a young age onwards. However, children can’t possibly help and share with everyone in their environment, so how do children decide whom to help? One way to decide how to allocate effort would be to think about people’s needs. Accordingly, the present research examined whether children would help a peer who was depicted as incompetent (i.e., in need of more help) more than a peer who was depicted as competent (i.e., in need of less help). We hypothesized that children would help a peer depicted as less competent more than a peer depicted as more competent.

Study 1a (N = 128, 4-8 years) assessed children’s helping behavior with regard to puzzles and or sports (between subjects). Children were introduced to two (unfamiliar) peers, one competent and one incompetent, who were ostensibly solving a puzzle or shooting balls into a hoop in another room. They were told one peer was smart or sporty (i.e., competent), and one was not smart or not sporty (i.e., incompetent). Then they were shown two levers (see Figure 1), one in front of each peer’s room, and told that these were connected to the rooms the two peers were in, and that each push of a lever would help the corresponding peer a little. Subsequently, they got the opportunity to help as long and much as they wanted to. The experimenter made it clear they could help one, both, or neither peer.

Linear mixed-effects models showed that across both domains of helping, older children pushed the lever more times and for a longer period of time for the incompetent peer compared to the competent peer (all p’s < .001). However, younger children pushed the lever equally both peers (respectively, number of pushes: p =.54, time spent pushing: p =.59). Interestingly, 4-year-olds most often helped both peers equally (48.1%) but also frequently helped the competent peer more (37 %); only a small minority of 4-year-old children helped the incompetent peer more (14.8%). For children older than 4 years however, the majority helped an incompetent peer more than a competent peer (> 50 %).

To rule out that young children did not understand who needed more help, we conducted Study 1b in which children were, using the same set-up, asked which peer needed more help. Of the 25 4-year oldss tested, 23 children said that the incompetent peer needed more help than the competent peer (binomial test, p < .001), suggesting that the results cannot be explained by a lack of understanding the relative need in our task.

The current research shows that while older children take into account a peer’s abilities when helping them, younger children do not. Rather, younger children helped both competent and incompetent peers equally, despite that they knew that the incompetent peer needed more help. This is an important result because it suggests that only older children helped those that needed it more, while younger children’s helping was guided by other concerns (e.g., a motivation to be fair).

Authors

• Jellie Sierksma, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author