Children's gendered expectations of helping

• In Event: Minimal and real-world social categories shape expectations of prosocial behavior across development

Abstract

Introduction: We can all agree that it is good to help others. However, it is problematic when certain groups of people are expected to help more than others, especially when helping comes at a cost to the individuals providing help. For example, women are more likely to be asked, and agree, to do work that benefits others at a cost to themselves (e.g., Babcock et al., 2017). Although young girls and boys help at similar rates (e.g., Warneken & Tomasello, 2007; Svetlova et al., 2010), more recent work finds that by about age 7, children expect girls to be more communal (e.g., other-oriented) than boys (Block et al., 2018), with potential implications for gendered expectations of helping. Do children expect girls to help more than boys, and does this expectation differ depending on whether helping comes at a cost to the helper? Here, we explore the development of gendered expectations regarding different types of other-oriented helping.

Method: We recruited 193 5- to 8-year-old children (96 girls). Children were told stories about students at school who had an opportunity to help. Some stories involved obligatory helping, in which the act of helping would prevent someone from being harmed. Others involved nonobligatory helping, in which the classroom/school would benefit from the act of helping, but helping was not morally mandated. For the nonobligatory helping scenarios, we also manipulated whether helping would come at a cost to the students (e.g., would prevent them from studying for a test). For each story, children were shown cartoon drawings of two groups of students (girls vs. boys) and asked to guess whether one of the girls or one of the boys said they would help in the story. Children additionally provided a confidence judgment on their choice of helper (e.g., sort of sure girl/boy vs. really sure girl/boy).

Results: We conducted two mixed-effects linear models to explore (1) whether children expect girls or boys to help more, and whether their expectations differ for obligatory and nonobligatory helping situations (see Figure 1), and (2) whether children expect girls (vs. boys) to help in costly situations, but not necessarily in noncostly situations (see Figure 2). For all types of helping, girls expected other girls to be more likely to help than other boys. Young boys started out with a similar ingroup bias, expecting other boys to be more likely to help than other girls. However, with age boys increasingly choose a girl as the helper, particularly in the costly situations.

Discussion: We provide evidence for gendered expectations of helping emerging in middle childhood. This expectation that girls will help in all types of situations raises questions about the costs of prosocial behavior to those who enact it: It is good to help, but it is also unfair to expect girls and women to help more than boys and men.

Authors

• Sophie Arnold, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Katharina Block, New York University

• Andrei Cimpian, New York University