The Impact of Concrete and Abstract Affiliative Benefits on Toddlers’ Helping Behavior

• In Event: 1-147 - Keeping Others in Mind: New Evidence for Selective and Effective Prosociality in Toddlers and Young Children

Integrative Statement

A growing body of research suggests that toddlers’ helping behavior is selective: by the second year of life toddlers choose to help some individuals over others and are more likely to help in some contexts over others. However, less is known about what drives this selectivity. Some evidence suggests that toddlers selectively help based on reciprocity and/or to reinforce good behavior; for example, toddlers are more likely to help prosocial over antisocial people. Here we investigate whether toddlers also consider affiliative benefits, or benefits gained from interacting with others, when deciding whom to help. Specifically, we investigated whether toddlers are more likely to help wealthy people, as there may be concrete benefits to helping people with more over less resources. In addition, we investigated whether toddlers are more likely to help in-group over out-group members as in-group members may be a more valuable source to learn from.

In the first line of work we introduced 18-month-old toddlers to one actor that was resource rich and one actor that was resource poor. Toddlers then had an opportunity to help one of the actors complete a block tower (their resources were no longer present). We found that toddlers were significantly more likely to help the rich actor over the poor actor (19 of 24), p=.007, binomial test. In a follow-up experiment we established that this effect was not purely driven by a positivity bias towards the rich actor: when the cost to help the rich actor outweighed the potential benefits, toddlers switched to helping the poor actor over the rich actor (19 of 24), p=.007, binomial test (see Figure 1).

In the second line of work we exposed 19-month-old toddlers (N=120) to an experimenter that labeled objects in either conventional ways (e.g., labeled a shoe a “shoe”) or unconventional ways (e.g., labeled a shoe a “dax” or labeled a shoe a “ball”); past work has shown that adhering to sociocultural conventions is a marker of group membership. Toddlers then had an opportunity to help the experimenter by bringing her an object she had dropped. Toddlers were significantly more likely to help an experimenter who previously labeled objects in conventional ways (87%) than an experimenter who previously labeled objects in unconventional ways (38%) (p = 0.0064, Fisher’s exact test; see Figure 2,).

Together these findings add to the growing body of literature showing that toddlers are selective helpers. Additionally, this work demonstrates that one factor that may drive toddlers’ helping is a consideration of the potential affiliative benefits gained by helping someone, at both a concrete level (e.g., gaining resources) and an abstract level (e.g., gaining knowledge). These findings help us to understand the motivations behind early helping behavior.

Authors

• Elizabeth Enright, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Horton, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica Sommerville, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author