Selectivity in early prosocial behavior

Kuhlmeier, Valerie A.; Dunfield, Kristen A.; O’Neill, Amy C.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00836

Cited by 73 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…That is to say, although the manipulation in the reward condition changed the child's expectation of a future reward, it might have also changed their perception of the puppet's social intent. There is evidence that children's prosocial behavior is selective (e.g., Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, ; Kuhlmeier, Dunfield, & O'Neill, ). For instance, 3‐year‐old children avoid helping people with harmful intentions (Vaish, Carpenter, & Tomasello, ) but share more with a partner who has shared with them before (Warneken & Tomasello, ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extrinsic Rewards Diminish Costly Sharing in 3‐Year‐Olds

2016

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Two studies investigated the influence of external rewards and social praise in young children's fairness-related behavior. The motivation of ninety-six 3-year-olds' to equalize unfair resource allocations was measured in three scenarios (collaboration, windfall, and dictator game) following three different treatments (material reward, verbal praise, and neutral response). In all scenarios, children's willingness to engage in costly sharing was negatively influenced when they had received a reward for equal sharing during treatment than when they had received praise or no reward. The negative effect of material rewards was not due to subjects responding in kind to their partner's termination of rewards. These results provide new evidence for the intrinsic motivation of prosociality-in this case, costly sharing behavior-in preschool children.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extrinsic Rewards Diminish Costly Sharing in 3‐Year‐Olds

2016

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“…Then, by age 3 or 4, children also develop another related motivation, to punish or withdraw cooperation from bad social partners (V. A. Kuhlmeier, Dunfield, & O'Neill, 2014;Warneken & Tomasello, 2013). This view is supported by evidence that 2.5-year-olds repeatedly help or share with their partner regardless of whether their partner returns the favor, but 3-year-olds share less over time if their partner never reciprocates (Warneken & Tomasello, 2013).…”

Section: Features Of the Recipientmentioning

confidence: 85%

Beyond Good and Evil

Martin

Olson

2015

Perspect Psychol Sci

102

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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.

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“…The foundations of contingent social behavior can be demonstrated even in infancy (Hamlin, 2013;Tomasello & Vaish, 2013). Even in the first 12 months of life children distinguish events that would be ascribed different valences by adults from their cultural group, such as events involving hitting and caressing (Premack & Premack, 1997), helping and hindering (Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, 2007;Kuhlmeier, Dunfield & O'Neill, 2014;Kuhlmeier, Wynn & Bloom, 2003), and equal and unequal distributions of resources (Geraci & Surian, 2011;Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011;Sloane, Baillargeon & Premack, 2012). Infants also distinguish the victims of harm from perpetrators (Kanakogi, Okumura, Inoue, Kitazaki & Itakura, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diverse ontogenies of reciprocal and prosocial behavior: cooperative development in Fiji and the United States

House

2016

Developmental Science

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Contingent reciprocity is an important foundation of human cooperation, but we know little about how reciprocal behavior develops across diverse societies, nor about how the development of reciprocal behavior is related to the development of prosocial behavior more broadly. Three- to 16-year-old children were presented with the opportunity to control the allocation of real food rewards in a binary-choice cooperative dilemma. Within dyads children alternated making choices across multiple trials, and reciprocal behavior emerged in three diverse populations (rural Fijian villages, and urban communities in both Fiji and the United States) by age 7-8. There was more societal variation in prosocial behavior than in reciprocal behavior, and there were more substantial differences between Fijians and Americans than between rural and urban populations. This suggests that the development of prosocial behavior is not driven entirely by the development of reciprocity, and differences in prosocial behavior across rural Fijians and urban Americans may not be due only to differences across rural and urban populations.

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Selectivity in early prosocial behavior

Cited by 73 publications

References 66 publications

Extrinsic Rewards Diminish Costly Sharing in 3‐Year‐Olds

Extrinsic Rewards Diminish Costly Sharing in 3‐Year‐Olds

Beyond Good and Evil

Diverse ontogenies of reciprocal and prosocial behavior: cooperative development in Fiji and the United States

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