Children’s intergroup prosocial behavior: The role of group stereotypes

Abstract

Children are prosocial from a young age onward but their prosocial actions are not necessarily egalitarian – especially with regard to others’ group membership. From around four years of age children tend to help and share more with in-group members compared to out-group members. However, a growing body of findings also suggest that sometimes children act more prosocially toward out-group members. How can we reconcile such seemingly contradicting behaviors? In this chapter, I describe how the salience of group stereotypes might shed light on these inconsistent findings. Specifically, different helping contexts can activate different group stereotypes. These different stereotypes could lead children to sometimes act more prosocially toward in-group peers, but sometimes show out-group bias in their helping or sharing behavior. For example, contexts that involve reciprocity could increase salience of a stereotype that out-groups are less trustworthy and thus children might be less inclined to share their resources with the out-group (i.e., in-group bias). Whereas an academic helping context might make a stereotype salient that entails out-groups are less competent and thus needing more help (i.e., out-group bias). Taking into account group stereotypes in children’s prosocial behavior will provide us with a deeper understanding of the underlying motivations that lead to selective prosociality in children. In the long run, such insights can contribute to combating discrimination and prejudice early in life.

Who, how, and when do children help? A systematic review of children's outgroup prosocial behavior

“…For example, Sierksma et al. (2014a) and Sierksma (2018) used a single‐item measure. Like individual‐level resource allocation, in Sierksma et al.…”

“…Like individual‐level resource allocation, in Sierksma et al. (2014a), children were asked, “How much money would you give?” In Sierksma (2018), helping intentions were measured by asking children, “Would you help [recipient name]?” The remaining studies each used three items and assessed helping intentions largely in terms of schoolwork: for example, helping an immigrant child write an essay (Vezzali, Cadamuro, Versari, Giovannini, & Trifiletti, 2015). Children's responses were assessed with a 5‐point (Cocco et al., 2021; Vezzali, Cadamuro, Versari, Giovannini, & Trifiletti, 2015; Vezzali, Stathi, Crisp, & Capozza, 2015) and a 4‐point (Vezzali, Stathi, Crisp, Giovannini, et al., 2015) response scale.…”

“…Despite a growing awareness of fairness, as outlined in the SRD, children's perceived cost of helping within each given context can influence their fairness judgments, thus in turn affecting their outgroup prosocial behavior. Among Dutch children ages 8–13, across two studies, with two relevant ethnic outgroup targets in the Netherlands (Surinamese and Moroccan children), a high cost of helping (i.e., helping will take a lot of time and effort) was associated with less outgroup helping intentions compared to ingroup helping intentions, but no change in ingroup prosocial behavior (Sierksma, 2018). This difference suggests that understanding the perceived cost, whether a personal commitment of time or energy or a social cost (i.e., the Black Sheep effect; Abrams et al., 2014) is worth incorporating into studies of outgroup prosocial behavior because it in a contextual factor that affects children's fairness judgments, as described by the SRD.…”

“…However, we recognize that more recent work has started to incorporate the possibility for these factors to be both individual-level and contextual. For example, although we discuss outgroup stereotypes as an individual-level factor, Sierksma (2023) suggests outgroup stereotypes can be a contextual-level factor changing the salience of group stereotypes in different prosocial contexts. Another example is cost of helping, which we identify as a contextual factor, but may also be an individual-level factor based on each person's own judgments of their personal costs.…”

“…One such example could be structural inequalities—children's awareness of structural inequality can interact with their fairness judgments, thus influencing how they behave toward the outgroup (Rizzo & Killen, 2020). Another example could be the cost of helping, where more challenging instances of helping become barriers to prosocial behavior (Hitti & Mulvey, 2021; Sierksma, 2018). Furthermore, as a developmental model, SRD also proposes age‐related changes in children's group‐based moral reasoning, and these changes can be on both the individual‐ and context‐level factors.…”