Prosocial Arousal in Early Childhood

• In Event: 1-201 - Diverse Perspectives on the Development of Fairness: Integrating Research on Prosociality, Ownership, and Distributive Justice

Integrative Statement

Children younger than three years of age demonstrate a remarkable array of helping behaviours (Martin & Olson, 2015). Studies directly assessing toddlers’ intrinsic motivation to help, found that young children are primarily concerned with seeing others’ being helped rather than actively helping (Hepach, 2017). Children’s’ physiological arousal increases in response to seeing others in need and children look longer at solutions that best help others (Hepach, Vaish, Grossmann, & Tomasello, 2016; see also Köster, Ohmer, Nguyen, & Kärtner, 2016). Furthermore, 2- and 3-year-old children’s internal arousal decreases irrespective of who provides the help unless children have accidentally caused the harm in which case arousal remains high if they cannot themselves provide the help (Hepach, Vaish, & Tomasello, 2017).

However, to date children’s attention to others’ needs has been studied exclusively in typically developing children from Western cultural backgrounds. In addition, the flexibility of children’s motivation to help has thus far only been documented in guilt-like situations.

In one line of work, we found that typically developing 2- to 4-year-old children but not age-matched children with ASD correctly anticipated an adult’s need, F(1, 39) = 6.66, p = .01, eta2 = .13. Both groups showed increased pupil dilation after the fact when the need remained unresolved. Within the ASD-group, this effect was stronger for children with a high developmental quotient, F(1, 27) = 4.44, p = .045, eta2 = .11. In a second study, we found that children from a Western background (urban Germany) and from a non-Western cultural group (rural Kenya) across an age range of 3 to 9 years looked longer at the correct solution to an adult’s need compared to a non-social control condition, F(1, 133) = 6.43, p = .01, eta2 = .05.

In another line of research, we have investigated the flexibility of children’s prosocial motivation in the context of reciprocity. We were interested whether being helped changes toddlers underlying motivation to help given that previous work did not find children to increase their helping toward previous benefactors (Warneken & Tomasello, 2013). In two studies, we found that when 18-and 24-month-old children see a familiar adult needing help, their pupil dilation was similarly low whether they themselves or someone else provided the help. However, if the familiar adult had previously helped the child, children showed increased pupil dilation if they could not actively help their previous benefactor F(1, 55) = 4.11, p = .048, eta2 = 0.07. This motivation to actively reciprocate was specific to the previous helper and did not generalize to a new individual, F(1, 30) = 0.44, p = .51.

Together, these results suggest that children, even as mere observers of helping situations, concern themselves with others’ needs. Furthermore, children are intrinsically motivated to see others being helped unless actively helping others provides an opportunity to maintain and repair relationships, e.g., in the case of reciprocity and having accidentally harmed others. Children’s internal arousal in response to seeing others in need is thus genuinely prosocial.

Author

• Robert Hepach, Leipzig University
  Presenting Author