Competence-based helping: Young children do not distribute help according to need

• In Event: Do young children and non-human primates care about other people’s needs?

Abstract

How do children decide whom to help? One way to decide how to allocate effort would be to think about people’s needs. Whether children help based on other people’s needs, however, has been studied in a restricted set of circumstances and age ranges (see e.g., Warneken, 2018). As such, how children of diverse ages act on someone’s need for help is poorly understood. Using a novel task, the current preregistered research investigated how a target’s need for help influences children’s helping across a wide age range (4–8 years).
In Study 1 (n = 128, 4-8 years) we introduced children to two recipients who were said to be competent or less competent in one of two domains (between subjects): solving puzzles (smart vs. not so smart) or shooting balls into hoops (sporty vs. not so sporty). Then we used a cover story to teach children they could provide help to these recipients by pushing levers (see Figure 1).

A linear mixed-effects model showed that older children gave more help to a child who was described as having more difficulty with solving a puzzle or shooting balls into a hoop than to a child who was said to be competent in these domains (p<.001). Older children’s helping behavior was thus guided by the recipient’s competence; they devoted more help to the person who needed it more. In contrast, 4-year-old children helped competent and less competent children equally (p =.54; see Figure 2).

Study 2 (n= 20 4-year-old’s) revealed that 4-year-old children’s behavior was not due to their lack of understanding of who needed more help: When we asked them who needed more help, the majority of 4-year-old children indicated that an incompetent child needed more help than a competent child. Moreover, when we asked them who they wanted to help, over two thirds of the children in Study 2 (68%) did not want to help the incompetent child more than the competent child, even though they had just indicated the former needed more help.

Study 3 (n = 28) was conducted to rule out that 4-year-old children simply pushed the levers for fun rather than with the intention to help. Children did the exact same helping task but now we told them one of the rooms was empty, and thus pushing the lever connected to this room would not provide help to anyone. Results showed that nearly all of them solely pushed the lever that provided help. This casts doubt on the idea that children pushed both levers equally in Study 1 simply because they enjoyed it.

Overall these findings indicate that the goal of helping someone who needs more help was not at the forefront of most of the young children’s minds. This is an important finding and suggests that need-based helping – at least need that is based on someone’s competence – might thus be a much later developing or less robust milestone than previously assumed in the literature on the development of helping behavior.

Authors

• Jellie Sierksma, Utrecht University
  Presenting Author

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author