Emerging Selectivity: Group Membership and Early Prosociality

Young Children’s Conceptualisations of Kindness: A Thematic Analysis

“…This initial, often immediate, response from children in our sample that kindness should be directed towards kin and ingroup supports the notion of an in-group bias in prosociality in this age group (Hay, 2009;Eisenberg and Spinrad, 2015;Laible and Karahuta, 2015;Martin and Olson, 2015), and fits with experimental evidence that children aged 2 to 9 show more prosocial behaviour towards friends, family, and in-groups (in some cases even towards minimal groups created in the lab) than towards strangers, non-friends, and out-groups (Fehr et al, 2008;Olson and Spelke, 2008;Moore, 2009;Dunham et al, 2011;Paulus and Moore, 2014;Benozio and Diesendruck, 2015;Flook et al, 2019;Hilton et al, 2021), that children's moral reasoning is contingent on the group status of those involved (Decety and Cowell, 2014), and that children aged 5-13 believe there is a greater obligation to help racial in-groups (Weller and Lagattuta, 2013).…”

“…This suggests reciprocity is a well-accepted motivation among children of this age, in line with evolutionary explanations of prosociality (Hilton et al, 2021) and with research showing that children act on a principle of reciprocity as early as 3 years old (Olson and Spelke, 2008;Warneken and Tomasello, 2013b), and that 5-year-olds give more when recipients are aware of their giving (Leimgruber et al, 2012) and when observed by someone who is able to reciprocate (Engelmann et al, 2013). The data in the current study suggest both strategic (if I'm kind, they'll be kind to me) and norm-based (you must be kind back) reasoning about reciprocity.…”

“…However, indiscriminate prosocial behaviour would be too costly -if we are kind to everyone, we might not receive enough kindness back to offset the cost -and so we have also evolved selectivity, directing our prosocial behaviour to those most likely to reciprocate. In the absence of direct information about likely reciprocity, such as prior prosocial behaviour, group status can serve as a proxy for potential reciprocity (Hilton et al, 2021).…”

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

“…For children's helping behavior a similar pattern emerges: Children often want to help in-group members more (e.g., groups based on race or ethnicity: White 8-to-13-year-old's, Sierksma et al, 2014a;White 5-to-13-year-old's, Weller & Lagattuta, 2013; friendship groups: White 8-to-13-year-old's, Sierksma et al, 2015). Studies on children's actual helping behavior further show, for example, that White children in the U.S. provide more help to a White experimenter compared to a Black experimenter (Katz et al, 1976) and that children as young as 2 years help minimal in-group members more than minimal out-group members (Hilton et al, 2021;Plötner et al, 2015). Although much less is known about the role of group boundaries in other types of prosocial behavior, there is some indication that in-group biases also emerge beyond children's helping and sharing.…”