Poster #132 - Helpers or Halos: Do Dispositional Attributions or Global Evaluations Guide Children’s Partner Choice?

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Humans are social creatures and we often engage in behaviors that benefit others. However, simply helping everyone is maladaptive, risking exploitation by free-riders who accept helpful gestures but do not reciprocate the effort (Nowak, 2006). Instead, we engage in selective helping by choosing social partners who deserve our help (Dunfield, Kuhlmeier, 2010). Social partners who have previously reciprocated helpful behaviors are selectively helped more often than partners who did not reciprocate these behaviors (Kuhlmeier, Dunfield, O’Neill, 2014). However, the cognitive mechanism underlying the development of selective helping remains unclear.
Two possible mechanisms of selective helping have been proposed: global evaluation and dispositional evaluation. Global evaluations are valences reflecting our general attitude towards a person based on that person’s traits and/or behaviors. Alternatively, dispositional evaluations involve specifically assessing the likelihood of someone engaging in future helpful acts. When guided by a global evaluations mechanism, we would select partners by matching our positive or negative behaviors to a target’s valence. However, when guided by dispositional evaluations, we would select partners whose prior help-related behaviors provide evidence that they are most likely to reciprocate help in the future.
Experiment 1 examined whether children employ global evaluations when making selective helping decisions. Four-year-old children (N = 24) viewed pairs of line-drawn characters who were either positively or negatively appraised on one of three traits: helpfulness, politeness, or attractiveness (e.g. “This is Sam. Sam is very helpful.” or “This is Max. Max is not very helpful.”). Four test questions were administered to determine whom the participant wanted to help, play with, and give a preferred and non-preferred food item to. Participants predominantly choose positively evaluated characters to engage in positive social activities with (i.e. help, play with, and give the preferred food item to; p < .001) – even when the basis of those positive evaluations is unrelated to the character’s potential helpfulness. Thus, participants’ behaviors matched the character’s appraised valence, providing support for the global evaluation mechanism.
Experiment 2 (in progress) examined whether children would use dispositional evaluations to choose between characters when the characters had similar valences. In addition to four-year-olds, six-year-olds were included in this experiment, as disposition evaluations may require more cognitive effort, and therefore, may develop later in life (Kalish, 2002). We presented children with pairs of characters that were positively appraised but possessed different traits (either helpful, polite, or attractive). The same four test questions as in Experiment 1 were used to evaluate participants’ partner-choice preferences across contexts. Preliminary results across both age groups do not indicate a preference for the helpful characters over the characters described as polite or attractive, as would be expected from a dispositional evaluation mechanism (p > .05). Rather, selection across all three traits was relatively equal. These results suggest that children are making global evaluations and simply responding to the characters’ generally positive valences. Future research will explore the developmental trajectories and contextual constraints that determine when individuals make general versus specific evaluations of others’ social behaviors.

Authors

• Anna-Francesca Boatswain-Jacques, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Xiao Min Chang, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jonathan S Beier, University of Maryland at College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristen Dunfield, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author