The Imitation of Prosocial Activities in 16-month-olds – How Children Learn to Help Others

• In Event: 3-033 - Variability in Prosocial Behaviors: Social and Motivational Sources Across Cultures

Integrative Statement

In the 60s and 70s, research on the development of children’s social behavior, especially aggressive behavior, focused on social learning mechanisms underlying its development. Corresponding studies were inspired by Bandura’s social cognitive theory and focused on how school-aged children learn these behaviors through the observation of social models. However, comparably little is known about the role of imitation in the emergence of early prosocial behavior in very young children, for example when 1-year-olds hand over an object to a needy adult.
In two experiments, we thus investigated the imitation of helping behavior by 91 16-month-old infants. In Study 1, infants repeatedly observed an adult model helping (prosocial model condition) or not helping (control condition) another individual by making a desired object accessible (e.g., model puts brick on a table or not), before they had the opportunity to instrumentally assist an unfamiliar experimenter in the subsequent test phase. In one of two tasks, more children in the prosocial model condition helped than in the control condition (47% vs. 13% helpers).
In Study 2, we included a second control condition to test whether infants imitated the prosocial intention when considering the neediness of the individual in need (no neediness control condition). In particular, infants in this condition had seen the same modelling behavior (e.g., model puts bricks on the table), but the “helpee” did not need the models’ help since she has different plans (i.e., she uses alternative objects instead). Children in the prosocial model condition helped significantly more often than children in the no model control condition (giving 66% vs. 27% of all target objects to the experimenter), with the no neediness control condition falling in between (53%).
Moreover, we found that infants’ overall helping rate in Study 1 was relatively low (i.e., Mstudy1 = 1.1 out of 6 objects, SD = 1.6). After including a standardized warm-up phase with the unfamiliar experimenter in the test phase (and optimizing materials), infants overall helping rate was significantly higher in Study 2 (Mstudy2 = 2.7 out of 6 objects, SD = 2.5).
In summary, these findings demonstrate that observing prosocial behavior in others affects infants’ prosocial behavior and provides a critical mechanism in early prosocial development. In particular, we argue for the integration of recent findings that highlight the constituting role of social factors in children’s early prosocial development (e.g., Brownell, 2016; Cortes-Barragan & Dweck, 2015; Dahl, 2015; Dahl et al., 2017; Hammond & Carpendale, 2015) and findings that highlight toddlers’ natural proclivity to help others (e.g., Melis, 2018; Warneken & Tomasello, 2009).

Authors

• Nils Schuhmacher, University of Münster
  Presenting Author

• Moritz Köster, Free University Berlin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Joscha Kärtner, University of Münster
  Non-Presenting Author