Children’s Helping is Conditional on Opportunity Cost and Familiarity With the Target.

• In Event: Young children's moral judgements and prosocial behaviors

Abstract

Developmental research in the past decade has painted the picture of a precocious child ready to engage in a range of prosocial behavior, but less is known about the situational factors that moderate this behavior. The present study investigated children’s readiness to help the victim of a transgression, where the opportunity cost of helping and familiarity with the victim varied across conditions. Opportunity cost was operationalized as the time and effort expended on providing help, that could otherwise be used to earn a reward from a productive task; while familiarity varied based on whether there was prior contact between the child and victim.

120 five- to six-year-olds in Singapore were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 (High-Cost, Low-Cost) x 2 (Familiar Victim, Unfamiliar Victim) design. Children in high-cost conditions were promised an attractive reward if they completed a coloring within time constraints, while children in low-cost conditions were not required to complete any task. To establish familiarity, the familiar victim engaged in conversation with the child prior to the event; in contrast, children had no contact with the unfamiliar victim. During the event phase, a transgressor actress destroyed the victim actress’s tower of blocks. The victim then attempted to elicit helping behavior in a series of increasingly direct prompts, progressing from generic expressions of dismay (e.g., “Oh no, my tower…”), to explicit appeals for help (e.g., “Will you help me to redo my tower?”). Children’s instrumental help toward the victim, such as picking up the strewn blocks and reconstructing the tower, was assessed as a dichotomous “Yes/No” variable.

Generalized Linear Models with binomial error structure were performed on the data. The analysis revealed an interaction between cost and familiarity, B = -1.74, SE = 0.84, p = .039; χ2(1) = 4.49, p = .034, which was followed up by examining the simple effects of familiarity at each level of cost (Figure 1). When helping was costly, children were equally unlikely to help the familiar and unfamiliar victim, B = -0.41, SE = 0.53, p = .43; OR = 0.66, 95% CI = [0.23, 1.85]. On the other hand, children were more likely to help the familiar victim than the unfamiliar victim when helping invoked little cost, B = 1.33, SE = 0.66, p = .044; OR = 3.76, 95% CI = [1.10, 15.28]. There was a general aversion toward helping the victim, with children across all but the least prohibitive condition helping less than chance: HC-FV = 36.67%, HC-UV = 46.67%, LC-UV = 63.33%, binomial p’s > .05; LC-FV = 86.67%, binomial p < .001 (Figure 2).

Overall, children extended a helping hand only when the barriers curtailing self-interest were relaxed. These results converge with evolutionary accounts suggesting that self-interested concerns—What do I stand to lose? Can I expect something in return?—underlie prosocial behavior. In sum, children’s reply to the question “Will you help me?” appears to be “I’ll help—but only if I know you and have nothing better to do.”

Authors

• Kristy Lee, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Peipei Setoh, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author