Relationships between Children's Prosocial Behaviors and Choices in Story Dilemmas

Abstract

A measure of prosocial choice in story dilemmas was created by adding 23 stories to an original 4 studied by Eisenberg-Berg and Hand (1979). Each story called upon the child to make either a prosocial or a hedonistic choice in the hypothetical situation. Adding more items improved the internal consistency of the measure, as predicted by the Spearman-Brown formula. In our Head Start sample, the children's prosocial responses significantly predicted more prosocial ratings of child behavior by parents. The same relationship held, although less consistently, with behavior ratings carried out by observers in the Head Start classroom. Parents' ratings of themselves on mental health and parenting variables were not related to the measure of prosocial choice in story dilemmas. These findings as a whole provide some exception to past findings of lack of correspondence between responses to hypothetical situations and real-life behavior.

Adolescents' Prosocial Behavior Predicts Good Grades Beyond Intelligence and Personality Traits

“…In addressing the role of PB, it is also important to disentangle its unique role from basic personality/dispositional factors (i.e., intelligence and traits) that are relevant for both PB and academic achievement. In fact, some studies have indicated that PB is modestly related to intelligence or to cognitive abilities (especially at younger ages; Carlo, Hausmann, Christiansen, & Randall, ; Weidman & Strayhorn, ; see Eisenberg et al, ), probably because prosocial children have sophisticated socio‐cognitive skills, such as perspective taking.…”

Children's Use and Knowledge of Display Rules for Anger Following Hypothetical Vignettes versus Following Live Peer Interaction

“…The first factor is whether behavior or cognition is compared across hypothetical versus live contexts. Children's hypothetical and live responses are more related when behavior is assessed (Eisenberg, Fabes, Minore, Mathy, Hanish, & Brown, 1994;Hay, Zahn-Waxler, Cummings, & Iannotti, 1992;Mize & Ladd, 1988;Weidman & Strayhorn, 1992) rather than cognition (Hughes, Robinson, & Moore, 1991). These findings suggest that using hypothetical vignettes to assess knowledge of display rules for anger, a largely cognitive construct, may be problematic.…”

Intelligence and Prosocial Behavior: Do Smart Children Really Act Nice?

“…Some studies have shown modest to moderate positive correlations (often .20 to .40) between measures of intelligence and prosocial behavior (Ma and Leung 1991;Weidman and Strayhorn 1992;Abroms and Gollin 1980;Krebs and Sturrup 1982;Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow 1982). Theories of mind, academic achievement and grade point average have also been linked to the presence of prosocial behavior (Caprara et al 2000;Wentzel and Caldwell 1997;Zhao and Zhang 2004).…”