Varieties of Young Children’s Prosocial Behavior in Zambia: The Role of Cognitive Ability, Wealth, and Inequality Beliefs

By the 3rd year of life, young children engage in a variety of prosocial behaviors, including helping others attain their goals (instrumental helping), responding to others’ emotional needs (comforting), and sharing resources (costly giving). Recent work suggests that these behaviors emerge early, during the first 2 years of life (Svetlova et al., 2010; Thompson and Newton, 2012; Dunfield and Kuhlmeier, 2013). To date, however, work investigating early varieties of prosocial behavior has largely focused on Western samples and has not assessed the impact of poverty and inequality. In this work, we investigate prosocial behavior in 3-year-olds in Zambia, a lower-middle income country with high wealth inequality. Experiments were integrated into a larger public health study along with both objective and subjective (parent) measures of wealth and inequality. Three-hundred-seventy-seven children (Mean age = 36.77 months; SD = 2.26 months) were presented with an instrumental helping task, comforting task, and two steps of a giving task – one with higher cost (children could give away their only resource) and one with lower cost (children had three resources to give). As predicted, rates of prosociality varied hierarchically by the cost of the action: instrumental helping was the most common followed by comforting, lower cost giving, and higher cost giving. All prosocial behaviors were significantly correlated with one another (with the exception of high cost giving), and with general cognitive ability. Objective family wealth did not predict any of the child’s prosocial behaviors. However, subjective beliefs showed that mothers who believed that they had more than others in their village had children who were more likely to engage in instrumental helping, and mothers who believed that village inequality was a problem had children who were more likely to engage in low cost giving. Low cost giving was also more likely for children whose parents reported reading storybooks to them. This suggests that costly giving in the context of pretend play may relate to children’s experience with using stories as representations of real life events. The results suggest both cultural differences and universalities in the development of prosociality and point to environmental factors that influence prosociality

Preschoolers’ Selfish Sharing Is Reduced by Prior Experience With Proportional Generosity

Young children make sophisticated social and normative inferences based on proportional reasoning. We explored the possibility that proportional cues also help children learn from and about their own generosity. Across two experiments, 3- to 4-year-olds had the opportunity to give either 1 of 4, 1 of 3, 1 of 2, or 1 of 1 of their resources to an individual in need. We then measured children’s subsequent prosociality by looking at sharing behavior with a new individual. The more proportionally generous the initial action, the less likely children were to share selfishly in the second phase. Our results suggest that children make sense of their own actions using proportional cues and that giving children experience with difficult, prosocial actions increases the likelihood of their recurrence

Conflicting perspectives mediate the relation between parents’ and preschoolers’ self‐referent mental state talk during collaboration

We examined the relations between the referent of parents and preschoolers’ mental state talk during a collaborative puzzle‐solving task (N = 146 dyads; n = 81 3‐year‐olds, n = 65 4‐year‐olds). The results showed that parents’ references to their own knowledge and beliefs (self‐referent cognitive talk), and references to their child’s knowledge and beliefs (child‐referent cognitive talk) were both related to children’s (primarily self‐referent) cognitive talk. We then tested whether any of the observed relations could be explained by the presence of conflicting perspectives within the collaborative interaction. Mediational analyses revealed that conflicting perspectives mediated the positive relation between parents’ production of self‐referent cognitive talk and child cognitive talk. By contrast, the positive relation between parents’ production of child‐referent cognitive talk and child cognitive talk did not depend on the presence of this type of conflict. These findings highlight an important mechanism through which parents’ references to their own mind might promote children’s developing mental state talk in collaborative contexts

Dirty Money: Altruistic Behaviors In The Ultimatum Game

Reactions towards and perceptions of unfair offers in the ultimatum game have been studied extensively. However, little research to date has focused on people's understandings of hyperfair (altruistic) offers -- that is, offers that are unfair in one's own favor. Participants played a version of the ultimatum game in which they received a fair (50-50) or hyperfair (80-20) offer from a confederate proposer. The present research demonstrated that compared to fair offers, hyperfair offers led to increased positive mood and decreased negative mood, such that those initially reporting low positive mood were most positively impacted by a hyperfair offer. Secondly, people avoided interpersonal contact with those who were hyperfair and perceived them as being less conscientious and more open. Although hyperfair offers did not have any significant impact on people's donations to charity, an interesting trend emerged: participants who donated to charity thought of their hyperfair proposer as being more extraverted, more agreeable, and less neurotic. These results have important implications for our understandings of altruists and altruistic behaviors

Concepts Of Choice, Morality, And Prosocial Behavior In Early Childhood

Choice is critical for a variety of positive developmental outcomes, including selfesteem, well-being, and intrinsic motivation. The intuition that our actions are freely chosen is also important for our causal reasoning and our moral evaluations of others. In this dissertation, I explore the interplay between young children's concepts of choice and their emerging morality. Chapter 1 reviews current theories of moral development and sets up ideas for future investigations. Chapter 2 explores three related questions: (i) What do children's early concepts of choice look like?; (ii) Do children believe moral and social actions are choices?; and (iii) What are developmental and cultural variations in children's beliefs about moral actions as choices? Chapter 3 focuses on how children make the choice between following moral/social obligations and following their own desires. Chapter 4 directly investigates whether children's ideas of choice influence their emerging prosocial behavior. Finally, Chapter 5 reviews how concepts of choice may be intimately tied to young children's moral cognition and prosocial behavior

Authoritative Parenting and Beliefs in Agency Impact Children's Views on Fairness and Inequality

By the preschool age, children develop a strong understanding of norms, fairness, and inequality. However, little is known about the social mechanisms underlying these developments; a gap we hope to bridge. We explored how parenting styles and beliefs in agency affect children's beliefs about inequality. Four-to-eight-year-old children (n=45; target n=80) were exposed to two trials in which they watched a character be disadvantaged either due to poor performance (merit) or a bad decision (self-chosen) and were asked to make a fairness judgment and resource reallocation. We also assessed parenting style and children’s beliefs in free choice/agency. We found that children with authoritative parents gave more stickers to disadvantaged characters and were more likely to think of both inequalities as fair. Additionally, greater belief in free choice correlated with belief in the fairness of both inequalities. Results show how parenting and beliefs in choice impact children’s social cognition