Social Contact Facilitates 2- and 3-year-old Children’s Helping

• In Event: From Expectations to Experiences: Understanding Prosociality in Childhood

Abstract

Recent work has found that young children are overwhelmingly prosocial; they comfort those in distress, they share their toys, and they help others pick up out of reach objects. However, we know that children do not always help others, and one important factor that may impact early prosociality is the connection the child has with the person in need of help. In fact, recent work has found that 2.5-year-old children are significantly more likely to help familiar over unfamiliar people (Allen, Perry, & Kaufman, 2018). In the current set of experiments, we build on these findings to investigate whether even subtle manipulations of social contact (or any social interaction) impacts early helping behavior.

Across four experiments, we manipulated the amount of prior social contact children had with an experimenter who would later need help. We then tested whether or not children helped the experimenter who dropped pens all over the ground by picking the pens up. In Experiment 1, we found that 3-year-old children (N=80) were significantly more likely to help the experimenter when they had completed a 2-minute warm-up with the experimenter in need (55% of participants helped) than when they completed the warm-up with a different experimenter (33% helped), χ2(1) = 4.11, p = .043, φ=.227. Additionally, children were significantly more likely to help when the experimenter in need of help previously said hi/verbally acknowledged the child (58% helped), than when the experimenter did not verbally acknowledge the child (30% helped), χ2(1)= 6.15, p = .013, φ=.277.

In Experiment 2 we found that 2-year-old children who completed a 2-minute warm-up with the experimenter in need of help were also significantly more likely to help (50% helping) than children who completed a warm-up with a different experimenter (20% helping), χ2(1)= 9.89, p =.002, φ=.314 thus replicating Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, we ran a replication of the verbal acknowledgment condition of Experiment 1 and found that 3-year-old children (N = 100), were equally likely to help the experimenter whether they were verbally acknowledged by the experimenter (38% helping) or not (32% helping), χ2(1)= .71, p =.398, φ=.084. However, in a mini meta-analysis across the verbal acknowledgment manipulations in Experiments 1 and 3 we found that this effect was significant, Mr=.17, Z=2.35, p=.019. Finally, in Experiment 4 we tested whether eye contact alone was enough to influence helping behavior and found that for 3-year-old children (N = 100), prior eye-contact with the experimenter in need of help was not enough to increase helping; 42% of children helped in the eye contact condition and 28% helped in the no eye-contact condition, χ2(1)= 2.15, p=.142, φ=.147.

Taken together, our findings suggest that prior social contact with a person in need of help can increase helping behavior. We found evidence that a 2-minute warm-up was sufficient to increase helping and some evidence that verbal acknowledgment may also increase helping, however very subtle cues (e.g. eye-contact) is not enough to increase helping. Taken together, even subtle cues of social contact influence early helping behavior.

Authors

• Elizabeth A Enright, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Alia Martin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristina R Olson, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author