Scaffolding the Emergence of Infant Helping: Experimental and Naturalistic Data

• In Event: Social and cultural influences on early prosociality

Abstract

Most infants can help others by their first birthday, for instance by handing back out-of-reach objects to adults (Dahl, 2015; Hammond, Al-Jbouri, Edwards, & Feltham, 2017). What explains this remarkable achievement? One possible contributor to the emergence of infant helping is caregiver scaffolding, including encouragement, praise, and demonstration. Some researchers have proposed that everyday scaffolding is crucial for the early development of helping (Brownell & The Early Social Development Research Lab, 2016; Dahl, 2018). In contrast, others have proposed that caregiver behaviors are not central to the emergence of helping in infancy, but only guide its subsequent development (Warneken, 2016; Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). Recent findings show that adults scaffold infant helping during everyday interactions in the second year, and that scaffolding increases helping early in the second year (Dahl, 2015; Dahl et al., 2017; Waugh et al., 2015). Even among chimpanzees, adults implicitly scaffold infant helping, for instance by demonstrating handing objects (Ueno & Matsuzawa, 2004). However, past research leaves open the question of whether scaffolding is involved in the emergence of helping in the first year. The present research aimed to fill this gap.
In a longitudinal experiment, infants (N = 37, mean age = 8.5 months) were randomly assigned to a scaffolding condition or a control condition. Infants participated in 10 weekly home visits in which an experimenter (E) built a novel structure. In the scaffolding condition, E provided encouragement, praise, and thanks when infants helped, for instance by handing an out-of-reach building piece to the E. In the control condition infants received no scaffolding. After the study, infants were presented with new helping opportunities to test for generalization of helping tendencies. The intervention had an immediate effect on infant helping: On the first visit, infants’ in the scaffolding condition helped significantly more (M = 6.0 acts) than infants in the control condition (M = 2.2 acts), Poisson regression: b=1.0, z=5.51, p < .001. Across conditions, older infants also tended to help more than younger infants, b=0.23, z=2.48, p=.013. However, the difference between the scaffolding and control condition decreased with the number of visits, b=-0.12, z=-8.30, p<.001, suggesting that merely observing the experimenter engaging in the procedure also stimulated infant helping. Still, in the post-experiment assessment of generalization, infants in the scaffolding condition were more helpful (M = 2.9 acts) than infants in the control condition (M = 2.2 acts), b=0.56, z=2.75, p=.006 (Figure 1). To assess whether infants’ propensity to help the experimenter related to infants’ propensity to help other family members, the study also collected naturalistic video recordings during each visit. The presentation will report relations between the experimental and naturalistic data, yielding an unprecedented look into the origins of helping in the first year.
The findings shed light on the social processes that contribute to the emergence and development of helping in the first year of life. Moreover, the presentation will discuss how a combination of a longitudinal experiment and naturalistic observations can be leveraged to reveal the origins of infant prosociality.

Authors

• Audun Dahl, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Celia A Brownell, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mary Taylor Goeltz, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author