Social and cultural influences on early prosociality

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

The roots of human prosociality can be found both in the species’ evolutionary background and in our early socio-cultural experiences. Comparative research has yielded insights about the former; recent developmental research has begun to examine how early social interactions can explain infants’ and toddlers’ prosocial endeavors. Paper-1 introduces a novel means of quantifying infants’ selfish desires to possess objects and shows that infants are able to override their possessiveness in order to engage altruistically with a stranger. Further analyses showed that altruistic behavior was linked to socio-cultural experience: Infants from ethnic/cultural “interdependent” backgrounds were more likely to override possessiveness in favor of altruism. Paper-2 presents findings from a longitudinal experiment investigating whether and how adult socialization influences infant helping in the first year. The presentation will discuss evidence that scaffolding significantly impacts and molds infant helping as early as the first year of life. Paper-3 takes a longitudinal approach and reports in detail how prosocial behavior develops in the second year and how parental structuring is not only associated with toddlers’ immediate helping behavior during joint interaction but has also generalized effects across time and across situations. A Discussant will integrate the papers by (a) proposing several principled ways in which socio-cultural learning influences early prosocial behavior and (b) tying this work to moral development in later childhood. Notably, this symposium includes participants of diverse racial, gender, and national backgrounds, and illustrates the value of integrating socio-cultural and longitudinal experimental and multi-method approaches to explain the origins of human prosociality.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, University of Washington

Discussant

• Harriet Over, University of York

Individual Presentations

• Human infants can override possessive tendencies in favor of altruism - Presenting Author: Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, University of Washington; Non-Presenting Author: Andrew N Meltzoff, University of Washington

• Scaffolding the Emergence of Infant Helping: Experimental and Naturalistic Data - Presenting Author: Audun Dahl, University of California - Santa Cruz; Non-Presenting Author: Celia A Brownell, University of Pittsburgh; Non-Presenting Author: Mary Taylor Goeltz, University of California, Santa Cruz

• The social roots of early helping behavior - Presenting Author: Joscha Kärtner, University of Münser; Non-Presenting Author: Marta Giner Torréns, University of Münster (Germany); Non-Presenting Author: Nils Schuhmacher, University of Münster