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Poster #129 - Children’s Prosocial Facilitation of Others’ Communicative Goals

Thu, March 21, 12:30 to 1:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

The past decade has seen an explosion of research into young children’s prosocial behavior. Even infants appear to prefer prosocial actors (Hamlin, 2007), and before their second birthday children spontaneously help others fulfill their physical goals (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). Recently, this work has been extended to show that, by age 3, children also facilitate others’ social goals (Beier et al., 2014, 2017). Here we investigate children’s helping of a particularly important social goal: communication.

Experiment 1 asked whether 5-year-olds (N = 24) spontaneously complete another person’s failed communication – and, if so, whether they do so to benefit the person sending the message or receiving it. Children observed a hiding game in which one experimenter (Communicator) hid an object in one of three containers while the other experimenter’s (Receiver) back was turned. On two trials, in a counterbalanced, within-subject manipulation, the Communicator attempted to tell the Receiver either where the object was hidden (Helpful Intent condition) or to mislead her into falsely believing it was in a different container (Deceitful Intent condition). The Communicator said the Receiver’s name and pointed at one container, but was called away before the Receiver turned around and could see the pointing.

Children’s spontaneous communications to the Receiver generally matched the Communicator’s intent (p < .001): 19/24 children indicated the true location in the Helpful Intent condition, whereas 23/24 indicated the false location to which the Communicator had pointed in the Deceitful Intent condition. This demonstrates that children readily facilitate a third-party’s failed communication, even when helping one person’s communicative goal may conflict with another person’s interest in being truthfully informed. Because communicative goals are aimed directly at others’ mental states, this suggests that early helping behavior includes support for others’ goals toward purely abstract states of the social world.

Experiment 2 (N = 26) attempted to rule out the possibility that children might simply have imitated the behaviors associated with the Communicator’s first, unsuccessful, communicative act. Specifically, it investigated whether children’s motivation to facilitate a third-party’s communication is influenced by the prior success or failure of that communication. One trial replicated the Deceitful Intent condition of Experiment 1 (now called the Incomplete Deception condition). On a second trial, children experienced another event with a similar setup, but in which the Receiver turned around in time to see the Communicator’s pointing (the Completed Deception condition). We reasoned that if children were prosocially supporting the Communicator’s mentalistic goal, they should take into account whether or not the message was received. Following our predictions, we found that, although children in both conditions often repeated the Communicator’s deceitful communication (binomial p’s <= .008, chance = .33), they did so more quickly when the Receiver had not seen it (Wilcoxon signed ranks, p = .003). This result suggests that children’s behavior was guided both by their awareness of the Communicator’s intent and by their assessment of whether the Communicator had successfully influenced the Receiver’s state of knowledge.

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