The impact of personal costs on young children’s helping behaviour

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Past research suggests that young children are eager to share resources (Hay & Cook, 2007), comfort those in distress (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner & Chapman,1992), and provide help (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). However, there continues to be debate over the underlying motivation of these prosocial behaviours: some researchers suggest young children are acting altruistically (Warneken & Tomasello, 2009), whereas others suggest children are simply looking to see their goals met (Kenward & Gredeback, 2013). In order to determine whether their behaviours reflect true generosity, it is important to understand if their actions reflect giving to those with a greater need, and giving, even when doing so requires a cost to the self.

Our prior work suggests that when personal costs are increased, prosocial behaviour diminishes in children (Sommerville et al., 2018) whereas other research suggests that personal costs have no impact on prosocial actions (Nielsen, Gigante, & Collier-Baker, 2014). Understanding how young children weigh others’ needs against self-costs, and whether they reduce personal costs at the expense of others’ needs will provide better insight into our understanding of the development of prosocial behaviours.

In this research, we investigated the role of personal costs on young children’s willingness to help themselves and another person. Three- and five year-old (N = 32) children were presented with a novel game paradigm where children were trained to move desired objects (ex. cookies, stickers) into either backpack by clapping. The game consisted of 20 unique trials: half were easy, (i.e., the child only needed to clap once to get the item into the backpack) and half were hard (i.e., 5 claps were required to move the item to the backpack). On half the trials, the child moved objects into their own backpack; on the other half they moved objects into the third-party character’s backpack. Before playing each trial, the children were told the difficulty level (i.e., easy or hard) and who they would be playing for in the next trial (i.e. themselves or the character). The child could choose to play the trial, or skip to the next one. In addition to observing whether or not children chose to play each trial, we also recorded the number of times children clapped to move the objects on each trial.

To understand the relationship between the cost of helping others and the personal cost of clapping more for difficult trials, we ran a two-way repeated measures ANOVA. Preliminary results demonstrate that children (N=32) more frequently played easy over difficult trials, F(1,31)= 8.466, p= 0.007. Children also demonstrated a preference for helping themselves over others, F(1,31)= 11.507, p= 0.002. Finally, we found that children engaged in more clapping behaviour across trials that were for themselves versus a third party, F(1,31)=9.513, p=0.004. These findings suggest that by three years of age, children weigh personal costs when determining whether they will engage in helping behaviour. In ongoing work, we are considering individual differences in helping behaviour through measures of empathy and inhibitory control.

Authors

• Ella van Beers, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Clare Jiachun Jiachun Zhang, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rachel Tennenhouse, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author