Children Perpetuate the Status Quo When They Help Peers

• In Event: Facilitating Positive Intergroup Relations: Research on Children’s and Adolescents’ Out-Group Prosociality

Abstract

Migration is on the rise worldwide. Despite attempts to promote social solidarity, xenophobia and discrimination persist. Children demonstrate group-based biases from a young age, and such biases are associated with detriments in children’s social and academic development. A promising solution is to encourage prosocial behavior across group’s boundaries. It is therefore pivotal to understand how helping between children with different backgrounds takes form and what the consequences are of stimulating children to help each other.

When children help others they can do so in different ways. For example, they might decide to provide a correct answer (i.e., non-empowerment help; Nadler, 2002). Such help alleviates someone’s need in the short run but does not provide an opportunity to practice and improve. Children could also decide to help others by providing strategies to find the correct answer now and later on (i.e., empowerment help). Such help provides a long-term solution to the another’s needs by improving their skills. Across three preregistered studies, I aimed to understand whether children might perpetuate inequality by providing already competent children with more opportunities to practice compared to children they perceive as less competent.

Study 1 (N = 253, 6-9 years) explored whether children understand that not all help is equal. Children watched videos of children working on academic tasks while some received hints and others correct answers. Results showed that at 7 years of age children thought that children who received hints, versus correct answers, were smarter and would learn more.

Study 2 (N=100, 7-9 years) tested whether children might perpetuate the status quo by providing different types of help to competent and incompetent children (akin to how stereotypes about competence might influence intergroup helping, e.g., Sierksma et al., 2018). Through a cover story children were introduced to two children whom they later overheard were either good at solving puzzles or not so good at it. Subsequently participants got to help both of them with a puzzle-quiz by providing hints or correct answers when they asked for help. Results showed that children were more likely to provide empowerment help to those they perceived as competent, and non-empowerment help to those that seemed incompetent to them (see Figure 1).

Study 3 (preregistered sample N = 34, 7-9 years) uses the same set-up and manipulation, but children now provide help on a math test that was presented as unambiguously about practice and learning. These data will rule out that children solely keep the status quo on tasks that they might associate with ‘fun’ and ‘luck’ (i.e., puzzles). Preliminary analysis (N =24) suggests that children also perpetuate inequality on a math task (p < .001).

Overall, this work suggests that when young children perceive differences in competence (e.g., based on stereotypes), they contribute to maintaining the status quo through differentiated helping. This points to the possibility of a self-sustaining circle, that starts early in life, in which the most vulnerable children that would profit the most from improving their skills receive less opportunity to do so from their peers.

Author

• Jellie Sierksma, Utrecht University
  Presenting Author