Poster #124 - Intention-Mediated Selective Helping in Infancy After a Delay

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Humans are a remarkably cooperative species. However, indiscriminately cooperating with everyone all the time may eventually lead to exploitation by free-riders: individuals that accept the benefits of cooperation without incurring the costs. Mechanisms need to be in place in order to direct prosocial behavior and mitigate the risks of free-riders. Reciprocity is a well-established behavioral phenomenon that resolves this issue whereby costs incurred by helping another are expected to be compensated by that other in the future (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981). Helping stabilizes because it becomes mutually beneficial. We know that children will track who has helped them in the past and who has not, and will provide subsequent help accordingly (Kuhlmeier, Dunfield & O’Neill, 2014). Children show specificity in their early helping behavior on the basis of others’ underlying intentions (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2010). Many previous examinations of selective helping have used immediate tests, yet most reciprocal interactions do not actually occur immediately. One’s ability to continuously monitor and remember people in social interactions over time is consequently necessary to sustain viable cooperation. The current study examines the mechanism underlying early selectivity by exploring whether children remember and maintain their individual attributions of others based on intentions over a delay.
In a series of two experiments, we examined 20 to 36 month old children’s selective prosocial behavior. Participants were given an opportunity to interact with two confederates who differed in their intentions towards the child. One displayed a positive intention to provide a desired toy but continually dropped the toy out of reach of the child (unable). The other confederate displayed a negative intention towards the child by intentionally withholding the toy (unwilling). Neither confederate actually provided the toy. At test, another toy was dropped between, but out of reach of the confederates thus providing the participants with an opportunity to engage in selective helping. A second, identical test event was administered after a delay of 20 minutes. Consistent with past research (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2010), two-year-old children showed a preference for the unable confederate over the unwilling one, both immediately (binomial test, p = 0.022) and after a 20 minute delay (p = 0.035). A second experiment is replicating these findings without an immediate test to examine the strength of children’s spontaneous evaluations and the role that immediate evaluations play in the strength of these representations. The second experiment will reveal whether children encode and hold relevant social information in memory only in immediate interaction, or over a certain delay of time as predicted.
These results replicate past research suggesting that two-year-old children represent others’ prosocial intentions and use that information to direct their helping behaviour. Moreover, children maintain these representations in memory over a short delay suggesting that cognitive mechanisms that underlie reciprocal altruism are in place early in development.

Authors

• Maxine Iannuccilli, Concordia Univeristy
  Presenting Author

• Kristen Dunfield, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author