Gendered expectations for children’s emotional, cognitive, and physical helping

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

Abstract

Both adults and children appreciate that some helping entails greater costs than other helping and use cost information to distinguish between individuals (Radovanovic et al., under review). However, helping behavior can vary not only in the degree of cost that individuals incur (e.g., giving more resources) but also in the types of costs that individuals incur. Specifically, there are not only physical costs when helping others, such as energy and material sacrifice, but also emotional and cognitive costs. To this end, women are more likely to regulate emotions (e.g., prioritizing others’ emotions, regulating others’ emotions; Hochschild, 1983; Stevens et al., 2001) and to cognitively engage with tasks beyond the concrete helping action (e.g., anticipating needs, identifying options to resolve needs, monitoring results; Daminger, 2019) relative to men. These gender differences begin emerging in childhood (Crouter et al., 2001), and these gendered forms of labor are often invisibilized because they do not involve clear visual cues (Dean et al., 2022). Thus, the present work investigated adults’ evaluations of children’s helping actions to assess whether they equally appreciated different costs involved in helping actions and whether they exhibited gendered expectations for which children would perform each form of labor.

Adults (N = 52; 24 women, 27 men, 1 nonbinary person) were shown short vignettes in which two cartoon children engaged in helping. To ensure that the gender of the recipient did not influence responding and to allow for scenarios that could be used with children, participants were introduced to a fictionalized town where children and anthropomorphized hippos live together. Givers were always matched in gender and race. Adults first viewed nine scenarios in which both givers engage in a similar helping action, but one giver incurred an additional cognitive (e.g., anticipating a need), emotional (e.g., hiding disappointment), or physical cost (e.g., lifting more items). Adults correctly indicated the child who incurred a greater cost as more helpful across all three types of costs (all p’s < .001). However, when adults later viewed scenarios comparing the three forms of labor, they prioritized physical labor over cognitive (t(51) = -3.72, p < .001) and emotional labor (t(51) = -5.04, p < .001), and cognitive over emotional labor (t(51) = -2.98, p = .004). Thus, while adults identified each form of labor, they devalued cognitive and emotional costs. Further, adults displayed gendered associations with each form of labor. When shown nine additional vignettes in which a mystery character helped, adults were significantly more likely to select girls for cognitive costs (x2(51, 1) = 4.46, p = .03) and marginally more likely for emotional costs (x2(51, 1) = 3.56, p = .06), relative to physical costs.

Thus, adults displayed gendered expectations for the ways in which children would help others: prioritizing cognitive and emotional labor for girls relative to boys, and also devaluing these forms of labor relative to physical helping. Future work will assess at which age children begin to appreciate these forms of helping, as well as when they exhibit similar biases.

Authors

• Mia Radovanovic, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Tim Wei-Ting Chao, University of Toronto

• Mahima Tirunelveli Santhakumar, University of Toronto

• Nila Curtosi, University of Toronto

• Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto