Children’s Evaluations of Helpful and Unhelpful People

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Humans are a cooperative species who readily help each other. Even young infants, who cannot provide much in the way of help, prefer those who intend to help over those who intend to another agent’s goals (Hamlin et al. 2007). Less is known about how young children evaluate those who do not provide help when another person is in need. Prior work, focusing on older ages, has examined children’s evaluations of those who fail to provide help in India and the United States (Miller et al., 1990). Unlike children in India, who viewed not helping as unacceptable, American children’s evaluations were more nuanced, and centered on the potential helper’s relationship with the needy person (e.g. whether they were friends or family members) and the severity of that need. This work raises questions concerning when children’s evaluations of not helping emerge and how they change throughout development.
The current pre-registered study examines 3- to 6-year-old children’s evaluations of helpful and unhelpful people and their acceptability judgments of helpful compared to unhelpful acts. In Experiment 1, children (N = 95 of planned 96) watched two sets of videos. In the first set, children watched a helpful interaction, where a target character provided help to another character who attempted to hang up a poster, and a neutral interaction, where there was no need for the target character to address (Terrizzi et al., 2020). After watching the first set of videos, children indicated which character was meaner or nicer. In the second set of videos, children watched helpful and not helpful actions and rated their respective acceptability. Children evaluated the helper more positively than the neutral character (59 of 95, p = 0.01), though this was primarily driven by 5-year-olds judgments (24 of 28, p < 0.01). Children also viewed helpful actions as more acceptable than unhelpful inaction (X2(1) = 85.01, p < 0.01), and there were no age-related differences in these judgments.
In Experiment 2 (N = 61 of planned 96), we expanded this work by examining children’s evaluations of characters who do not help compared to neutral characters. The procedure was the same as in Experiment 1. Overall, children did not view the neutral character more positively than the non-helper (34 of 61, p = 0.22). While 3- and 4-year-olds’ evaluations of nonhelpers and neutral characters were similar (all p’s > 0.18), 5-year-olds evaluated neutral characters more positively (15 of 17, p < 0.01). As in Experiment 1, children viewed helping as more acceptable than not helping, (X2(1) = 52.02, p < 0.01), and this finding was consistent across age groups. Though we cannot continue in person data collection due to COVID-19, we plan to replicate this study online and anticipate completing data collection before the conference. Future work should examine how social and cultural factors influence the development of children’s evaluations and acceptability judgments.

Authors

• Amanda Mae Woodward, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Sydney Forman
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jonathan S Beier, Other
  Non-Presenting Author