Beyond Good and Evil

Abstract

Researchers have proposed different accounts of the development of prosocial behavior in children. Some have argued that behaviors like helping and sharing must be learned and reinforced; others propose that children have an initially indiscriminate prosocial drive that declines and becomes more selective with age; and yet others contend that even children's earliest prosocial behaviors share some strategic motivations with the prosociality of adults (e.g., reputation enhancement, social affiliation). We review empirical and observational research on children's helping and sharing behaviors in the first 5 years of life, focusing on factors that have been found to influence these behaviors and on what these findings suggest about children's prosocial motivations. We use the adult prosociality literature to highlight parallels and gaps in the literature on the development of prosocial behavior. We address how the evidence reviewed bears on central questions in the developmental psychology literature and propose that children's prosocial behaviors may be driven by multiple motivations not easily captured by the idea of intrinsic or extrinsic motivation and may be selective quite early in life.

Explicit scaffolding increases simple helping in younger infants.

“…This question was important because several researchers have proposed that early helping is unaffected by encouragement and praise (Martin & Olson, 2015; Warneken & Tomasello, 2009, 2013). The processes by which various forms of scaffolding influence infant helping is a key topic for future research.…”

“…The second reason was theoretical. It has been proposed that neither encouragement nor praise (nor other forms of scaffolding) influences the earliest forms of helping (Martin & Olson, 2015; Warneken & Tomasello, 2009, 2013), implying that early helping behaviors would develop normally in the absence of scaffolding of infant helping, barring pathological cases. The joint manipulation of encouragement and praise – two common and associated forms of explicit scaffolding – provides a test case for this proposal.…”

“…According to a contrasting proposition, scaffolding does not contribute to the emergence of infant helping (Martin & Olson, 2015; Warneken, 2015; Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). Instead, it is argued, infants have a natural tendency to help others that emerges independently of adult scaffolding or socialization.…”

“…Both studies found no effects of encouragement and praise on helping rates. The findings have led to the conclusion that encouragement and praise generally have no effect on infant helping (Martin & Olson, 2015; Warneken, 2015). By 20 months of age, however, most infants have already mastered simple instrumental helping tasks (Svetlova et al, 2010; Warneken & Tomasello, 2006).…”

The origins of belonging: social motivation in infants and young children

“…Further evidence in favour of the claim that young children seek to engage in positive social interactions comes from research on prosocial behaviour [53][54][55]. From as early as 14 months, and more robustly from 18 months, infants help others to achieve their instrumental goals [56,57].…”