Understanding Children’s Prosocial Motivations: The Relation Between Helping, Comforting and Imitation

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

Integrative Statement

In the past years, developmental psychologists have focused intensely on the study of children’s prosocial behaviors. Brilliant work has been done regarding the emergence of prosocial behaviors and the social, cultural and socio-cognitive factors that play an important role in children’s prosocial development. However, one topic that has remained unclear is what drives young children to engage in prosocial actions. Indeed, children’s prosocial motivations has been a topic of much debate: Do children perform prosocial actions driven by a genuine prosocial motivation – i.e., by other-oriented concerns – or do other self-focused motives such as affiliative goals or their joy in (pro)social interactions play as well a crucial role? In this study, we tested whether interindividual differences in children’s prosocial attempts can be explained by interindividual differences in their affiliative tendencies. Therefore, we analyzed the association between children’s prosocial behaviors and imitation, which is a well-established indicator of the motivation to affiliate with others. A total of 59 German children (30 months old) were tested in two different domains of prosocial behavior, namely helping and comforting, and in an imitation task: a) In the helping tasks children helped the experimenter by taking objects out of a bag; b) In the comforting tasks children comforted the experimenter by providing verbal support, hugging her, etc. after her toy broke and she simulated sadness; c) In the imitation tasks, we rated whether children spontaneously reproduced the experimenter’s actions during a playsituation. To test whether children’s prosocial behaviors were related to their affiliative tendencies, we used a confirmatory factor analysis, and fitted the data to a model with two latent factors: a first factor representing children’s prosocial common core, with children’s helping and comforting responses as indicators, and a second factor explaining children’s affiliative tendencies, with children’s imitation responses as indicators. Results yielded a high correlation between children’s prosocial common core and children’s affiliative tendencies. Furthermore, in order to rule out that all three variables of interest relied on a general common factor, such as temperament (e.g., sociability), we tested the accuracy of the initial model over a single-factor model, where the variables of helping, comforting and imitation were explained by one common factor. Model comparisons revealed that the initial model explained the data more accurately than the single-factor model, which means that the two latent factors (the prosocial common core and affiliative tendencies) were related but conceptually distinct from each other. Overall, this study demonstrated that affiliation – as indexed by imitation – is associated with 30-month-olds’ prosocial behaviors. Thus, we argue that children’s affiliative tendencies should be taken into consideration in order to explain children’s interindividual differences in prosocial behaviors and better understand the underlying motivations that drive the different domains of children’s prosocial behaviors.

Authors

• Marta Giner Torréns, University of Münster
  Presenting Author

• Joscha Kärtner, University of Münster
  Non-Presenting Author