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A New Look at Children's Prosocial Motivation
Abstract
Young children routinely behave prosocially, but what is their motivation for doing so? Here, we review three studies which show that young children (1) are intrinsically motivated rather than motivated by extrinsic rewards; (2) are more inclined to help those for whom they feel sympathy; and (3) are not so much motivated to provide help themselves as to see the person helped (as can be seen in changes of their sympathetic arousal, as measured by pupil dilation, in different circumstances). Young children’s prosocial behavior is thus intrinsically motivated by a concern for others’ welfare, which has its evolutionary roots in a concern for the well-being of those with whom one is interdependent.
... In the last few decades, many books (Bonta, 1997;Henrich and Henrich, 2007;Tomasello, 2009;Bowles and Gintis, 2011;Nowak and Highfield, 2011;Boehm, 2012;Sterelny, 2012;Wilson, 2012;Tomasello and Vaish, 2013) and thousands of articles have been written about the extraordinary capacity of our species to cooperate at many levels. There is a growing scientific consensus that the capacity to cooperate is essential to understand the success of our species. ...
... With a few modifications, I present a model proposed by Michael Tomasello and his collaborators at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany (Tomasello, 2014(Tomasello, , 2016Tomasello and Vaish, 2013). According to Tomasello and his group, human cooperation evolved in two major steps. ...
Humans are highly motivated to cooperate, share, and help others. The evidence for this claim comes from examining prosocial behaviors as they show up very early in development, and by systematic comparisons between young children and mankind’s closest great ape relatives. Highly cooperative and social species that care for kin and nonkin members of their group are rare in nature and call for an evolutionary explanation. Based on the work of Michael Tomasello and others, I offer a possible explanation based on a two-phase model. The first phase of the evolution of cooperation and sociability is induced by climate change taking place during a critical period of human evolution. Climate variability produced shifts from wet, monsoon landscapes to dry and arid landscapes in East Africa, the home of many of humanity’s ancestors. Shifting environmental conditions produced selective pressures favoring adaptive flexibility and forced cooperation and interdependence among our hominin ancestors, who had to search for food (cooperative foraging) and protect each other from predators. Forced interdependence came together with two biosocial adaptations: a cooperative form of raising young children (cooperative breeding) and long-term mating patterns (pair bonding). These biosocial adaptations help explain how the species might have begun to develop emotionally modern intersubjective mind-reading capacities. During a second phase of the evolution of cooperation, the emergence of shared social norms, social reputations, the cumulative effects of cultural knowledge passed on over many generations, and cultural differences produced a new form of evolution: cultural evolution. In turn, cultural evolution produced a new cycle of innovations consisting of symbolic capacities and language. When it comes to psychotherapy, the same conditions that made one human—adaptive flexibility, cooperation, helping others and mutual enjoyment in sharing—are the same conditions that make for a strong therapeutic alliance.
... The work on the origins of other-regard, for instance, is rather limited. Among children, studies are only now emerging that show that young children genuinely care about the welfare of others (Hepach et al., 2012a, 2013), and this work has only explored simple instrumental helping situations. Whether such other-regard is present across diverse prosocial contexts and when it emerges in development are vital questions to answer if we are to understand the nature of this fundamental alignment process. ...
... This requires positive other-regard (as discussed above), which has the powerful capacity to bring about empathic concern wherein the observer not only feels as the other feels and identifies the other as the source of the feeling but also cares what happens to the other and is therefore motivated to enhance the welfare of the other. Notably, this means an alignment not only of the observer’s and target’s affective states but also of their goals and motivations: Both the observer and the target are invested in and affected by the target’s welfare and both are thus motivated to improve it (Hepach et al., 2013; Vaish and Tomasello, 2014). We now have the ingredients in place for empathic concern (or sympathy), which provides a fundamental motivational force for prosocial behavior. ...
The fact that humans cooperate with nonkin is something we take for granted, but this is an anomaly in the animal kingdom. Our species’ ability to behave prosocially may be based on human-unique psychological mechanisms. We argue here that these mechanisms include the ability to care about the welfare of others (other-regarding concerns), to “feel into” others (empathy), and to understand, adhere to, and enforce social norms (normativity). We consider how these motivational, emotional, and normative substrates of prosociality develop in childhood and emerged in our evolutionary history. Moreover, we suggest that these three mechanisms all serve the critical function of aligning individuals with others: Empathy and other-regarding concerns align individuals with one another, and norms align individuals with their group. Such alignment allows us to engage in the kind of large-scale cooperation seen uniquely in humans.
... The papers in the current issue speak to both questions, although with greater emphasis on the second. Hepach et al. (2013) use converging evidence from three studies with children between 18 and 25 months of age to argue that emerging prosociality is motivated by intrinsic concern for others' well-being. This other-oriented concern is held to derive from " an early moral sense in which we care about those with whom we are interdependent , " suggesting that early prosocial motives may reside in basic social-affiliative processes. ...
... Sommerville et al. (2013) discovered that egalitarian motives emerge between 12 and 15 months of age when infants come to expect equal (fair) over unequal (unfair) outcomes as they watch someone distributing resources to others. Hepach et al. (2013) adapted an established psychophysiological measure to the study of prosociality. ...
Prosocial behavior first appears in the second year of life. How can prosociality so early in life be explained? One possibility is that infants possess specialized cognitive and/or social capacities that drive its emergence. A second possibility is that prosocial behavior emerges out of infants' shared activities and relationships with others. These possibilities have motivated a number of current explanatory efforts, with a focus on two complementary questions. First, what is evolutionarily prepared in the very young child and how does it give rise to prosocial behavior? Second, how do proximal mechanisms, including social experiences, contribute to the early development of prosociality? The papers in this special issue represent some of the most recent work on these questions. They highlight a diverse array of new methods and bring them to bear on the nature and development of early prosocial understanding and behavior.
... Around 14 – 18 months they help obtaining objects that are out of an adult’s reach or remove obstacles that prevent an adult from completing an action [5], even without encouragement or praise [6], [7]. It has thus been suggested that children are altruistic by nature, with their initial altruistic tendencies being further developed and influenced by their subsequent social interactions with others [8], [9]. Thus, children’s altruistic behaviour increases with age, regardless of their socio-economic environment or cultural background [10], [11], even when facing adversity such as natural disasters [12]. ...
... Moreover, the degree of children’s concern for the adult correlated positively with the degree of their subsequent prosocial behaviour towards that person, suggesting that concern for the victim motivated their prosocial behaviour. Together these studies suggest that humans are prosocial by nature and that their ability to empathize and sympathize with others is a major factor motivating such prosocial behaviours [8], [9], [13]. ...
Prosocial behaviours such as helping, comforting, or sharing are central to human social life. Because they emerge early in ontogeny, it has been proposed that humans are prosocial by nature and that from early on empathy and sympathy motivate such behaviours. The emerging question is whether humans share these abilities to feel with and for someone with our closest relatives, the great apes. Although several studies demonstrated that great apes help others, little is known about their underlying motivations. This study addresses this issue and investigates whether four species of great apes (Pongo pygmaeus, Gorilla gorilla, Pan troglodytes, Pan paniscus) help a conspecific more after observing the conspecific being harmed (a human experimenter steals the conspecific’s food) compared to a condition where no harming occurred. Results showed that in regard to the occurrence of prosocial behaviours, only orangutans, but not the African great apes, help others when help is needed, contrasting prior findings on chimpanzees. However, with the exception of one population of orangutans that helped significantly more after a conspecific was harmed than when no harm occurred, prosocial behaviour in great apes was not motivated by concern for others.
... Preschool aged children will share valued resources and before long seek to establish fair allocations of resources across individuals (Thompson et al., 1997; Fehr et al., 2008; Brownell et al., 2009; Moore, 2009; Blake and McAuliffe, 2011). Although we know that preschool children will share, little is known about the mechanisms underlying such prosocial behavior (Hepach et al., 2013). By understanding these mechanisms, it should be possible to support and encourage the development of these highly valued, and critically important social behaviors. ...
This research explored the influence of empathic distress on prosocial behavior in a resource allocation task with children. Children were randomly assigned to one of two conditions before engaging in a sticker sharing task; watching either a video of a girl upset that her dog had gone missing (emotion induction condition), or a video of the same girl preparing for a yard sale (control condition). In study one, 5–6 year old children in the emotion induction condition rated the emotional state of both the protagonist and the self more negatively, and also exhibited more prosocial behavior; sharing more in advantageous inequity (AI) trials, and less often withholding a benefit in disadvantageous inequity trials, than the control group. Prosocial behavior was significantly correlated with ratings of the emotional state of the protagonist but not with own emotional state, suggesting that empathic concern rather than personal distress was the primary influence on prosocial behavior. In study two, 3-year-olds were tested on AI trials alone, and like the 5 and 6-year-olds, showed more prosocial behavior in the emotion induction condition than the control.
... From early in their second year children help adults unable to reach their goals [1]–[4]. Motivations for prosocial behaviour in young children are diverse [5]–[7], but one important motivation for helping in young children is an intrinsic sympathy-based feeling of altruism towards the individual in need of help [8]–[10]. This is demonstrated by studies showing that from 18 months children are more likely to help victims of anti-social acts [11], [12] and that helping is inhibited rather than promoted by rewards in 20-month-olds [13]. ...
Young children can be motivated to help adults by sympathetic concern based upon empathy, but the underlying mechanisms are unknown. One account of empathy-based sympathetic helping in adults states that it arises due to direct-matching mirror-system mechanisms which allow the observer to vicariously experience the situation of the individual in need of help. This mechanism could not account for helping of a geometric-shape agent lacking human-isomorphic body-parts. Here 17-month-olds observed a ball-shaped non-human agent trying to reach a goal but failing because it was blocked by a barrier. Infants helped the agent by lifting it over the barrier. They performed this action less frequently in a control condition in which the barrier could not be construed as blocking the agent. Direct matching is therefore not required for motivating helping in infants, indicating that at least some of our early helpful tendencies do not depend on human-specific mechanisms. Empathy-based mechanisms that do not require direct-matching provide one plausible basis for the observed helping. A second possibility is that rather than being based on empathy, the observed helping occurred as a result of a goal-contagion process in which the infants were primed with the unfulfilled goal.
Whether children share in anticipation of future benefits returned by a partner is an interesting question. In this study, 5-year-old children and an adult partner played a sharing game, in which children donated first and the partner donated afterward. In Experiment 1, the partner’s resources were more attractive than the child’s. In the reciprocal condition, the child was told that s/he would be a recipient when the partner played as a donor. In the non-reciprocal condition, however, the child was told that an anonymous child would be the recipient when the partner donated. Results showed that children shared more with the partner when they knew that they would be a recipient later. In Experiment 2, the child was always the recipient when the partner donated, but the partner’s resources were more desirable than the child’s in the high-value condition, and less desirable in the low-value condition. We found that children were more generous when the partner’s resources were valued higher. These findings demonstrate that 5-year-old preschoolers’ sharing choices take into account the anticipated reciprocity of the recipient, suggesting either self-interested tactical sharing or direct reciprocity in advance of receiving. Specifically, they adjust their sharing behavior depending on whether a partner has the potential to reciprocate, and whether it is worth sharing relative to the value of the payback.
The human pupil is a small opening in each eye that dilates in response not only to changes in luminance but also to novel events. This makes changes in pupil diameter an attractive measure in studies on infants’ and young children’s physical and social cognition. However, designing and interpreting pupillometry studies for developmental populations comes with its own caveats. Here we give an overview of how psychologically induced changes in pupil diameter have been investigated and interpreted in developmental studies. We highlight the methodological challenges when designing experiments for infants and young children and provide several suggestions to address common problems. The fact that pupillometry provides a sensitive measure of the time course of responses to novelty extends the scope of possibilities for researchers studying infant cognition and development.
Behaviour benefitting others (prosocial behaviour) can be motivated by self-interested strategic concerns as well as by genuine concern for others. Even in very young children such behaviour can be motivated by concern for others, but whether it can be strategically motivated by self-interest is currently less clear. Here, children had to distribute resources in a game in which a rich but not a poor recipient could reciprocate. From four years of age participants strategically favoured the rich recipient, but only when recipients had stated an intention to reciprocate. Six- and eight-year-olds distributed more equally. Children allocating strategically to the rich recipient were less likely to help when an adult needed assistance but was not in a position to immediately reciprocate, demonstrating consistent cross-task individual differences in the extent to which social behaviour is self- versus other-oriented even in early childhood. By four years of age children are capable of strategically allocating resources to others as a tool to advance their own self-interest.
Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
In evolutionary perspective, what is most remarkable about human sociality is its many and diverse forms of cooperation. Here, I provide an overview of some recent research, mostly from our laboratory, comparing human children with their nearest living relatives, the great apes, in various tests of collaboration, prosocial behavior, conformity, and group-mindedness (e.g., following and enforcing social norms). This is done in the context of a hypothetical evolutionary scenario comprising two ordered steps: a first step in which early humans began collaborating with others in unique ways in their everyday foraging and a second step in which modern humans began forming cultural groups. Humans' unique forms of sociality help to explain their unique forms of cognition and morality. © 2014. The Authors. European Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The contributions of these studies to our understanding of early prosocial motivation are discussed in the context of the broader research literature in this field. We consider first whether different forms of prosocial behavior (e.g., helping, sharing, and empathic assistance) reflect a core prosocial disposition in the early years. The methodological challenges of assessing prosocial behavior in very young children are considered next. We then discuss the origins of prosocial motivation in the early years, focusing on developing understanding of others' goals and intentions, the emergence of sensitivity to equity, emotion understanding, and other conceptual advances. We conclude with suggestions for future research directions for this exciting field of study.
International cooperation to tackle complex common resource problems like climate change is extremely difficult. Although there is broad agreement on the nature of the problem and what is required to solve it, many nations continue to block any meaningful action for solution. This global cooperation crisis is baffling in the light of recent evidence about the surprisingly cooperative disposition of human beings. Research from social and natural sciences points to an unmistakable conclusion: people cooperate all the time, and they enjoy doing so. This picture of human behaviour is at odds with common assumptions about people being narrowly — and exclusively — self-interested, and prompts the question that we address in this paper: why, if we are so good cooperating at interpersonal levels, is international cooperation so hard? We address this question in three steps. First, we review the recent multidisciplinary evidence demonstrating that people cooperate much more than rational-theory models predict, and that this might stem from a natural, evolved, predisposition to cooperate. Second, we argue that there are seven basic mechanisms that determine whether or not cooperation is successful or sustainable: reciprocity, trust, communication, reputation, fairness, enforcement and we-identity. We group these mechanisms in a ‘cooperation hexagon’ that summarizes the current consensus about what makes cooperation work. Finally, we discuss what these findings mean for global cooperation. We argue that power games are not enough to explain off current international cooperation blockades. A new, comprehensive theory of international cooperation must be compatible with the recent insights about the fundamentally cooperative nature of human behaviour. We suggest that the search for this theory be made in three directions: a) establish how cooperation scales up from interpersonal to lager scales, and how the basic mechanisms of cooperation behave under conditions of unprecedented complexity and rapid change; b) investigate cooperation at the ‘meso-level’ of global governance — the relatively small group of people who represent nations in international discussions and institutions — a key interface between interpersonal and inter-institutional motivations for cooperation; and c) examine patterns of international cooperation in the light of the cooperation hexagon, to ascertain whether international cooperation blockades are the result of the underprovisioning of the basic mechanisms of cooperation, and how these mechanisms can be used as criteria for designing better institutions for global governance.
Although developmental psychologists traditionally explore morality from a learning and development perspective, some aspects of the human moral sense may be built-in, having evolved to sustain collective action and cooperation as required for successful group living. In this article, I review a recent body of research with infants and toddlers, demonstrating surprisingly sophisticated and flexible moral behavior and evaluation in a preverbal population whose opportunity for moral learning is limited at best. Although this work itself is in its infancy, it supports theoretical claims that human morality is a core aspect of human nature.
Various nonhuman primate species have been tested with prosocial games (i.e. derivates from dictator games) in order to better understand the evolutionary origin of proactive prosociality in humans. Results of these efforts are mixed, and it is difficult to disentangle true species differences from methodological artifacts. We tested 2- to 5-year-old children with a costly and a cost-free version of a prosocial game that differ with regard to the payoff distribution and are widely used with nonhuman primates. Simultaneously, we assessed the subjects' level of Theory of Mind understanding. Prosocial behavior was demonstrated with the prosocial game, and did not increase with more advanced Theory of Mind understanding. However, prosocial behavior could only be detected with the costly version of the game, whereas the children failed the cost-free version that is most commonly used with nonhuman primates. A detailed comparison of the children's behavior in the two versions of the game indicates that the failure was due to higher attentional demands of the cost-free version, rather than to a lack of prosociality per se. Our results thus show (i) that subtle differences in prosociality tasks can substantially bias the outcome and thus prevent meaningful species comparisons, and (ii) that like in nonhuman primates, prosocial behavior in human children does not require advanced Theory of Mind understanding in the present context. However, both developmental and comparative psychology accumulate increasing evidence for the multidimensionality of prosocial behaviors, suggesting that different forms of prosociality are also regulated differentially. For future efforts to understand the evolutionary origin of prosociality it is thus crucial to take this heterogeneity into account.
Conducted a field experiment with 3-5 yr old nursery school children to test the "overjustification" hypothesis suggested by self-perception theory (i.e., intrinsic interest in an activity may be decreased by inducing him to engage in that activity as an explicit means to some extrinsic goal). 51 Ss who showed intrinsic interest in a target activity during baseline observations were exposed to 1 of 3 conditions: in the expected-award condition, Ss agreed to engage in the target activity in order to obtain an extrinsic reward; in the unexpected-award condition, Ss had no knowledge of the reward until after they had finished with the activity; and in the no-award condition, Ss neither expected nor received the reward. Results support the prediction that Ss in the expected-award condition would show less subsequent intrinsic interest in the target activity than Ss in the other 2 conditions. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Modern theories of the evolution of human cooperation focus mainly on altruism. In contrast, we propose that humans’ species-unique forms of cooperation—as well as their species-unique forms of cognition, communication, and social life—all derive from mutualistic collaboration (with social selection against cheaters). In a first step, humans became obligate collaborative foragers such that individuals were interdependent with one another and so had a direct interest in the well-being of their partners. In this context, they evolved new skills and motivations for collaboration not possessed by other great apes (joint intentionality), and they helped their potential partners (and avoided cheaters). In a second step, these new collaborative skills and motivations were scaled up to group life in general, as modern humans faced competition from other groups. As part of this new group-mindedness, they created cultural conventions, norms, and institutions (all characterized by collective intentionality), with knowledge of a specific set of these marking individuals as members of a particular cultural group. Human cognition and sociality thus became ever more collaborative and altruistic as human individuals became ever more interdependent.
The present study explored the development of self-presentation. Subjects were eighty-five 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds. Subjects were asked to tell children at another school about themselves three times: (1) a baseline self-description; (2) a self-description intended to convince the children to pick them as a partner for a game (goal-directed condition); and (3) a self-description intended to convince children who really wanted to win prizes to pick them as a partner (enhanced goal-directed condition). The self-presentational strategies of self-promotion and ingratiation were measured through increased production of game-related and social positive self-statements in the experimental conditions. The results revealed a developmental increase in selective self-presentation. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that kindergartners did not engage in selective self-presentation, whereas second and fourth graders exhibited more self-promotion than ingratiation in the enhanced condition. Attributional knowledge was also shown to have a significant effect on self-promotion.
Children's vicarious emotional responses and prosocial behavior were assessed, and the relations of these indexes to their mothers' sympathetic dispositions were examined. Mothers who were more sympathetic and better perspective takers had girls who reported feeling more sympathy and negative affect and less happiness after exposure to needy others. Mothers who reported more distress had girls who reported less negative affect and more happiness after exposure. Fewer relations between mothers' sympathy and vicarious emotional responsiveness were found for boys; however, there were more relations between boys' emotional responses and their helpfulness; boys who expressed more negative affect tended to be more helpful. These findings support the notion that the correlates of vicarious emotional responsiveness and prosocial tendencies are similar. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (1) the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and (2) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition.
The relations of kindergartners' to 2nd graders' dispositional sympathy to individual differences in emotionality, regulation, and social functioning were examined. Sympathy was assessed with teacher- and self-reports; contemporaneously and 2 years earlier, parents and teachers reported on children's emotionality, regulation, and social functioning. Social functioning also was assessed with peer evaluations and children's enacted puppet behavior, and negative arousability-personal distress was assessed with physiological responses. In general, sympathy was associated with relatively high levels of regulation, teacher-reported positive emotionality and general emotional intensity, and especially for boys, high social functioning and low levels of negative emotionality, including physiological reactivity to a distress stimulus. Vagal tone was positively related to boys' self-reported sympathy, whereas the pattern was reversed for girls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined modes of 31 female and 22 male preschoolers' (aged 46–70 mo) vicarious emotional responding (VER) in relation to their prosocial behavior. Ss viewed empathy-eliciting videotapes and had an opportunity to assist distressed children in 1 tape. VER was assessed with self-report, facial, and heart rate (HR) indexes. HR deceleration while viewing the tape of distressed children was positively related to helping individuals in the tape; HR acceleration was associated with not helping. Boys' facial sadness correlated positively with helping; their facial personal distress was negatively related to helping. Defensive behavior in the classroom was positively related to sympathetic facial reactions and self-reported sympathetic or sad reactions, and negatively correlated with facial personal distress. Compliant prosocial behaviors were associated with low facial concern, particularly for boys. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined empathy in 94 monozygotic (MZ) and 90 dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs during the 2nd year of life. Children's reactions to simulations of distress in others were videotaped in home and laboratory settings. Some components of concern for others increased with age between 14 and 20 mo for both MZ and DZ twins. Girls scored higher than boys on most of these observational measures. The different components (e.g., emotional concern, prosocial acts, and cognitive exploration) showed substantial coherence and low but significant stability over time. There was modest evidence for heritability of empathy, particularly for the affective component. Maternal reports of prosocial orientations indicated both genetic and environmental influences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tested the hypothesis that empathy leads to altruistic rather than egoistic motivation to help. 44 female college students watched another female undergraduate receive electric shocks and were then given a chance to help her by taking the remaining shocks themselves. In each of 2 experiments, Ss' empathic emotion (low vs high) and their ease of escape from continuing to watch the victim suffer if they did not help (easy vs difficult) were manipulated in a 2 × 2 design. It was reasoned that if empathy led to altruistic motivation, Ss feeling a high degree of empathy for the victim should be as ready to help when escape without helping was easy as when it was difficult. But if empathy led to egoistic motivation, Ss feeling empathy should be more ready to help when escape was difficult than when it was easy. Results followed the former pattern when empathy was high and the latter pattern when empathy was low, supporting the hypothesis that empathy leads to altruistic rather than egoistic motivation to help. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Investigated the development of prosocial and reparative behaviors by examining children's responses to distresses they caused and those they witnessed in others during the 2nd yr of life. Prosocial behaviors (help, sharing, provision of comfort) emerged between the ages of 1 and 2, increasing in frequency and variety over this time period. These behaviors were linked to expressions of concern as well as efforts to understand and experience the other's plight. Children's reparative behaviors after they had caused distress also increased with age. Age changes in these early signs of moral development were accompanied by social–cognitive changes in self-recognition. In assessments at age 2, children were most responsive to distress in their mothers but also showed some sensitivity toward unfamiliar persons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Conducted a natural field experiment building on the earlier work of Lewin, Zeigarnik, Deutsch, and Horwitz to test the following predictions: Persons are more likely to complete the interrupted goal attainment of liked than disliked others. For liked others, the frequency of this kind of helping is greatest when the others are close to completing their goal; for disliked others, nearness to a goal is irrelevant. Ss were 175 New York pedestrians. Data confirm these predictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In recent decades there has been a heightened interest in the origins and development of caring behaviors, and on factors that contribute to individual differences in these patterns. There has been an emphasis, as well, on both normative and non-normative expressions of concern for others, as empathy may be appropriate, muted, or excessive. Both biological and environmental processes have been implicated in the emergence of these different patterns. Although multiple factors in the environment influence biological processes, this chapter focuses on a review of theories and research emphasizing the associations between biological factors and the development of empathy, sympathy, altruism, and prosocial behavior. The chapter begins with a review of theories supporting the proposition that empathy (and related constructs) should be predictably linked to biological processes. This review includes consideration of psychoevolutionary theory, ethology and sociobiology, functional theories of emotion, and developmental perspectives. Then, empirical evidence illustrating links between concern for others and biological functioning is reviewed. Future avenues of research are suggested for each of the five aspects of biological functioning considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A study with 34-hr-old infants replicated previous findings with 70-hr-old Ss which show that infants cry to the sound of another newborn's cry and that the cry is a response to the vocal properties of the other's cry. Ss exposed to the newborn cry cried significantly more often than those exposed to silence and those exposed to a synthetic newborn cry of the same intensity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A model is presented to account for the natural selection of what is termed reciprocally altruistic behavior. The model shows how selection can operate against the cheater (non-reciprocator) in the system. Three instances of altruistic behavior are discussed, the evolution of which the model can explain: (1) behavior involved in cleaning symbioses; (2) warning cries in birds; and (3) human reciprocal altruism. Regarding human reciprocal altruism, it is shown that the details of the psychological system that regulates this altruism can be explained by the model. Specifically, friendship, dislike, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, trust, suspicion, trustworthiness, aspects of guilt, and some forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy can be explained as important adaptations to regulate the altruistic system. Each individual human is seen as possessing altruistic and cheating tendencies, the expression of which is sensitive to developmental variables that were selected to set the tendencies at a balance ap...
Young children help other people, but it is not clear why. In the current study, we found that 2-year-old children's sympathetic arousal, as measured by relative changes in pupil dilation, is similar when they themselves help a person and when they see that person being helped by a third party (and sympathetic arousal in both cases is different from that when the person is not being helped at all). These results demonstrate that the intrinsic motivation for young children's helping behavior does not require that they perform the behavior themselves and thus "get credit" for it, but rather requires only that the other person be helped. Thus, from an early age, humans seem to have genuine concern for the welfare of others.
The developmental origins of sharing remain little understood. Using procedures adapted from research on prosocial behavior in chimpanzees, we presented 18- and 25-month-old children with a sharing task in which they could choose to deliver food to themselves only, or to both themselves and another person, thereby making it possible for them to share without personal sacrifice. The potential recipient, a friendly adult, was either silent about her needs and wants or made them explicit. Both younger and older toddlers chose randomly when the recipient was silent. However, when the recipient vocalized her desires 25-month-olds shared whereas younger children did not. Thus, we demonstrate that children voluntarily share valued resources with others by the end of the second year of life, but that this depends on explicit communicative cues about another's need or desire.
The present objective was to investigate pupil size variation during and after auditory emotional stimulation. Thirty subjects’ (15 females and 15 males) pupil responses were measured while listening to 10 negative and 10 positive highly arousing sounds (e.g. a baby crying and laughing), and 10 emotionally neutral sounds (e.g. regular office noise). The subjects also rated their subjective experiences related to the stimuli. The results showed that the pupil size was significantly larger during both emotionally negative and positive stimuli than during neutral stimuli. The results for the time period of 2 s following the stimulus offset showed that pupil size was significantly larger after both negative and positive than neutral stimulation. These results suggest that the autonomic nervous system is sensitive to highly arousing emotional stimulation. The subjective ratings confirmed that the stimuli influenced the subjects’ emotional experiences as expected. Further analyses showed that female subjects had significantly larger pupil responses than males only to neutral stimuli and only during the auditory stimulation. In sum, our results showed that systematically chosen stimuli significantly affected the subjects’ physiological reactions and subjective experiences. It could be possible to use pupil size variation as a computer input signal, for example, in affective computing. Auditory emotion-related cues could also be utilized to modulate the user's emotional reactions.
The present work investigated young children's normative understanding of property rights using a novel methodology. Two- and 3-year-old children participated in situations in which an actor (1) took possession of an object for himself, and (2) attempted to throw it away. What varied was who owned the object: the actor himself, the child subject, or a third party. We found that while both 2- and 3-year-old children protested frequently when their own object was involved, only 3-year-old children protested more when a third party's object was involved than when the actor was acting on his own object. This suggests that at the latest around 3 years of age young children begin to understand the normative dimensions of property rights.
Human social intelligence comprises a wide range of complex cognitive and affective processes that appear to be selectively impaired in autistic spectrum disorders. The study of these neuro-developmental disorders and the study of canonical social intelligence have advanced rapidly over the last twenty years by investigating the two together. Specifically, studies of autism have provided important insights into the nature of "theory of mind" abilities, their normal development and underlying neural systems. At the same time, the idea of impaired development of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying "theory of mind" has shed new light on the nature of autistic disorders. This general approach is not restricted to the study of impairments but extends to mapping areas of social intelligence that are spared in autism. Here we investigate basic moral judgment and find that it appears to be substantially intact in children with autism who are severely impaired in "theory of mind". At the same time, we extend studies of moral reasoning in normal development by way of a new control task, the "cry baby" task. Cry baby scenarios, in which the distress of the victim is "unreasonable" or "unjustified," do not elicit moral condemnation from normally developing preschoolers or from children with autism. Judgments of moral transgressions in which the victim displays distress are therefore not likely the result of a simple automatic reaction to distress and more likely involve moral reasoning. Mapping the cognitive comorbidity patterns of disordered development must encompass both impairments and sparings because both are needed to make sense of the neural and genetic levels.
The study explored how the meaning of prosocial behavior changes over toddlerhood. Sixty-five 18- and 30-month-olds could help an adult in 3 contexts: instrumental (action based), empathic (emotion based), and altruistic (costly). Children at both ages helped readily in instrumental tasks. For 18-month-olds, empathic helping was significantly more difficult than instrumental helping and required greater communication from the adult about her needs. Altruistic helping, which involved giving up an object of the child's own, was the most difficult for children at both ages. Findings suggest that over the 2nd year of life, prosocial behavior develops from relying on action understanding and explicit communications to understanding others' emotions from subtle cues. Developmental trajectories of social-cognitive and motivational components of early helping are discussed.
What is compassion? And how did it evolve? In this review, we integrate 3 evolutionary arguments that converge on the hypothesis that compassion evolved as a distinct affective experience whose primary function is to facilitate cooperation and protection of the weak and those who suffer. Our empirical review reveals compassion to have distinct appraisal processes attuned to undeserved suffering; distinct signaling behavior related to caregiving patterns of touch, posture, and vocalization; and a phenomenological experience and physiological response that orients the individual to social approach. This response profile of compassion differs from those of distress, sadness, and love, suggesting that compassion is indeed a distinct emotion. We conclude by considering how compassion shapes moral judgment and action, how it varies across different cultures, and how it may engage specific patterns of neural activation, as well as emerging directions of research.
In the current resurgence of interest in the biological basis of animal behavior and social organization, the ideas and questions pursued by Charles Darwin remain fresh and insightful. This is especially true of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin's second most important work. This edition is a facsimile reprint of the first printing of the first edition (1871), not previously available in paperback. The work is divided into two parts. Part One marshals behavioral and morphological evidence to argue that humans evolved from other animals. Darwin shoes that human mental and emotional capacities, far from making human beings unique, are evidence of an animal origin and evolutionary development. Part Two is an extended discussion of the differences between the sexes of many species and how they arose as a result of selection. Here Darwin lays the foundation for much contemporary research by arguing that many characteristics of animals have evolved not in response to the selective pressures exerted by their physical and biological environment, but rather to confer an advantage in sexual competition. These two themes are drawn together in two final chapters on the role of sexual selection in humans. In their Introduction, Professors Bonner and May discuss the place of The Descent in its own time and relation to current work in biology and other disciplines.
Twelve subjects in each of two groups in experiments I and IA were instructed so as to induce respectively task-oriented and ego-oriented attitudes in their performance of 18 assigned tasks (see
18: 2739). The ratio between the average number of interrupted to completed tasks was 1.74 and .625 for I and IA respectively. Thus, when the person is ego-oriented, recall favors the completed (ego-enhancing, 'success') tasks. When the
S worked jointly with another person (experiment II), the ratio of interrupted to completed tasks was 1.50, showing that interrupted tasks are better recalled in co-operative as well as in isolated work. In experiment III, 23
Ss working alone at the same tasks as above were interrupted by
E who completed the task while
S watched. The ratio of interrupted to completed tasks was 1.20, indicating that completion of a task by another person (objective completion) may be as satisfactory as personal completion, even when the person is working alone. This depends upon task-orientation and upon the nature of the task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
"In this article an attempt has been made to sketch out a theory of cooperation and competition and apply this theory to the functioning of small groups… , (i) social situations of cooperation and competition were defined; (ii) some of the logical implications inherent in the definitions were pointed to; (iii) with the introduction of psychological assumptions, some of the definitions of the two objective social situations were then drawn; (iv) the psychological implications, with the aid of additional psychological assumptions, were then applied to various aspects of small-group functionings to develop a series of hypotheses about the relative effects of co-operation and competition upon group processes; and (v) finally the concept of group was defined and linked with the concept of cooperation, thus making all of the preceding theoretical development with respect to cooperation relevant to group concepts." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three categories of tension are identified as potential correspondents of psychological forces: tension arising from own needs, from induced needs, from the need to satisfy impersonal demands. To these, a fourth is added in which tensions are coordinated to someone else's desire to locomote toward or away from a region in his life space. From this Lewinian perspective, altruism and other less dramatic forms of prosocial behavior are part of a general theoretical question: What conditions determine whether individuals develop tension systems coordinated to another's goal attainment? The process by which tension is coordinated to another person's goal attainment is here called promotive tension arousal. Conditions that determine whether promotive tension arousal produces behavior that facilitates or hinders another's goal attainment are discussed.
2 studies were conducted to examine the roles of facial motion and temporal correspondences in the intermodal perception of happy and angry expressive events. 7-month-old infants saw 2 video facial expressions and heard a single vocal expression characteristic of one of the facial expressions. Infants saw either a normally lighted face (fully illuminated condition) or a moving dot display of a face (point light condition). In Study 1, one woman expressed the affects vocally, another woman expressed the affects facially, and what they said also differed. Infants in the point light condition showed a reliable preference for the affectively concordant displays, while infants in the fully illuminated condition showed no preference for the affectively concordant display. In a second study, the visual and vocal displays were produced by a single individual on one occasion and were presented to infants 5 sec out of synchrony. Infants in both conditions looked longer at the affectively concordant displays. The results of the 2 studies indicate that infants can discriminate happy and angry affective expressions on the basis of motion information, and that the temporal correspondences unifying these affective events may be affect-specific rhythms.
We examined the relation of parental empathy-related characteristics and emotion-related child-rearing practices to third and sixth graders' vicarious emotional responding. Children's heart rate, skin conductance, facial, and self-reported reactions to a sympathy-inducing film were assessed, as were their dispositional sympathy, empathy, and self-monitoring. Parental sympathy was positively related to low levels of personal distress in same-sex children and, for both parents, with sons' dispositional sympathy or empathy. Parental emphasis on problem-focused coping strategies when their sons were anxious was positively correlated with indexes of sons' situational and dispositional sympathy. Same-sex parental restrictiveness in regard to the control of inappropriate, hurtful emotional displays was associated with sons' and daughters' dispositional and situational sympathy, whereas maternal restrictiveness in regard to emotions that are unlikely to hurt others was correlated with nonverbal indexes of personal distress and self reports of low distress. Parental emphasis on control of the child's own negative emotion was associated with children's self-monitoring.
Recent developments in research cast doubt on early conceptions of young children as primarily egocentric and uncaring of others'' needs. Studies reviewed indicate a broad range of social competencies children bring to their interpersonal relationships. As early as 2 years of age, they show (a) the cognitive capacity to interpret, in simple ways, the physical and psychological states of others, (b) the emotional capacity to experience, affectively, the state of others, and (c) the behavioral repertoire that permits the possibility of attempts to alleviate discomfort in others. Both temperament and environment may contribute to individual differences in concern for others. Early socialization experiences that lead to adaptive and maladaptive patterns of responsiveness to others'' needs are described. Examples of environmental risk conditions include parental depression, marital discord, parental maltreatment. Implications of this work for broadening existing conceptualizations of empathy and related prosocial orientations are addressed.
Pupil size was measured while 30 male college students undertook five tasks respectively concerning, (a) muscle tension induced
by the lifting of weights, (b) fear induced by threat of a gunshot, (c) intense stimulation induced by loud pure tones, (d)
heightened attention from viewing novel pictures, and (e) pleasantness and unpleasantness in reaction to pictures that differed
in terms of their affect-inducing characteristics. Highly regular relationships were found between pupil size and degree of
muscle strain and between pupil size and the temporal ordering of events during threat of a gunshot. Significant effects on
pupil size also were found for the other three types of stimulation.
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies and widespread among animals, yet explaining how cooperative relationships persist without one party exploiting another remains a challenge. Although it is well established that altruism can be favoured when recipients are relatives or when they reciprocate, it is increasingly being recognized that many behaviours cannot be explained in these terms. Here, I argue that many cases of apparent altruism can be explained by interdependence. I formalize the degree of interdependence by defining an individual's ‘stake’ in another as the dependence of its fitness on that of the other. This provides a means of valuing others, analogous to Hamilton's valuation of relatives. It also provides a conceptual synthesis of theories of altruism, in which kinship and reciprocity become special cases. Interdependence means that cooperators can benefit as a secondary consequence of helping their recipients. Altruism can then be favoured when its costs are outweighed by the altruist's stake in the recipient's benefits. Whereas the exploitation problem makes reciprocal altruism inherently unstable, cooperation through interdependence can be stable because whatever others do, it is best to cooperate. I discuss the extent to which interdependence can explain examples of cooperation that cannot be explained in terms of kinship and reciprocity.
We investigated children's moral behaviour in situations in which a third party was harmed (the test case for possession of agent-neutral moral norms). A 3-year-old and two puppets each created a picture or clay sculpture, after which one puppet left the room. In the Harm condition, the remaining (actor) puppet then destroyed the absent (recipient) puppet's picture or sculpture. In a Control condition, the actor acted similarly but in a way that did not harm the recipient. Children protested during the actor's actions, and, upon the recipient's return, tattled on the actor and behaved prosocially towards the recipient more in the Harm than in the Control condition. This is the first study to show that children as young as 3 years of age actively intervene in third-party moral transgressions.
Two studies investigated whether young children are selectively prosocial toward others, based on the others' moral behaviors. In Study 1 (N = 54), 3-year-olds watched 1 adult (the actor) harming or helping another adult. Children subsequently helped the harmful actor less often than a third (previously neutral) adult, but helped the helpful and neutral adults equally often. In Study 2 (N = 36), 3-year-olds helped an actor who intended but failed to harm another adult less often than a neutral adult, but helped an accidentally harmful and a neutral adult equally often. Children's prosocial behavior was thus mediated by the intentions behind the actor's moral behavior, irrespective of outcome. Children thus selectively avoid helping those who cause--or even intend to cause--others harm.
One way to maintain cooperation between unrelated individuals and decrease the chance of providing costly aid to those who will not reciprocate is by selectively helping on the basis of the content of previous interactions. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the earliest instances of human helping behavior show specificity. In three experiments, we found that infants preferred to help an individual who, in a previous interaction, intended to provide a toy over one who did not (Experiment 1) and that infants consider this positive intention even without a positive outcome (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 provided a more detailed examination of the basis of selection, suggesting that infants are not solely avoiding unwilling individuals, but also selectively helping those who have shown a willingness to provide. Taken together, these experiments indicate that early helping behaviors show characteristics of the rich reciprocal relationships observed in adult prosocial behavior.
Two experiments investigated the proclivity of 14-month-old infants (a) to altruisti- cally help others toward individual goals, and (b) to cooperate toward a shared goal. The infants helped another person by handing over objects the other person was un- successfully reaching for, but did not help reliably in situations involving more com- plex goals. When a programmed adult partner interrupted a joint cooperative activity at specific moments, infants sometimes tried to reengage the adult, perhaps indicat- ing that they understood the interdependency of actions toward a shared goal. How- ever, as compared to 18- and 24-month-olds, their skills in behaviorally coordinating their actions with a social partner remained rudimentary. Results are integrated into a model of cooperative activities as they develop over the 2nd year of life. Prosocial behaviors such as helping and cooperation are interesting both cog- nitively and motivationally: To help someone with a problem, the helper must un- derstand the other's unachieved goal and possess the altruistic motivation to act on behalf of the other. Whereas in the case of helping, understanding another's indi- vidual goal of action might be sufficient, cooperative activities are based on the formation of a shared goal. That is, two or more persons have to perform interde- pendent roles directed at a shared goal and possess the motivation to mutually sup- port each other's action to reach that goal. These kinds of prosocial behaviors are at the core of the human condition. Indeed, humans might act altruistically and coop- erate in ways not found in other primates (e.g., Alexander, 1987; Richerson & Boyd, 2005), giving rise to social-cognitive skills such as complex mind reading and communication (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005).
