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1-072 - Children’s intergroup prosociality: How reputation, stereotypes, conformity, and learning shape behavior

Thu, April 6, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Austin Convention Center, Meeting Room 10C

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Children who can barely walk or talk spontaneously offer help in various contexts (Warneken & Tomasello, 2010). Children thus have a proclivity to do good. However, children’s behavior is often selective, depending on the social context. For example, children intend to help in-group peers more than out-group peers (Sierksma, Thijs, & Verkuyten, 2015), and are sensitive to the group membership of an observer when sharing resources (Engelmann, Over, Herrmann, & Tomasello, 2013). Combining insights from developmental and social psychology, this symposium presents the latest research on how minimal and existing group boundaries influence children’s (3 to 12 years) prosociality, involving data from the United States, the Netherlands, and Germany. The first paper investigates the role of concerns about reputation in shaping children's behavior, by examining whether children are more likely to help a friend—rather than a neutral peer—obtain a resource when they are (Study 1) or aren’t (Study 2) being watched by others. The second paper focuses on the role of stereotypes in motivating helping behavior toward out-group members. The third paper discusses whether children’s behavior is shaped by conformity, by investigating how children’s behavior changes after watching an in-group or an out-group adult (Study 1) or peer (Study 2) engage in a prosocial or antisocial act. The fourth paper describes how children learn from the evidence they see around them about what behaviors are likely to occur in intergroup contexts. Taken together, this symposium sheds light on how various factors shape children’s prosociality across development.

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