Shyness and Social Conflict Reduce Young Children's Social Helpfulness

Abstract

This study examined social influences on 3-year-old children’s decisions to help an experimenter gain another person’s attention (N = 32). Children were slower to help the experimenter when the target had previously expressed disinterest in attending to her. Shy children were less likely to support the experimenter’s attempts to communicate with the target; however, this association was not influenced by children’s knowledge of the target’s disinterest and there was no relation between shyness and children’s support for a separate physical goal. Therefore, young children’s decisions to act helpfully incorporate consideration for others beyond a focal person with an unmet need, and they are further constrained by children’s own comfort with the actions required to help.

Full text

!
!
!
!
Shyness and social conflict reduce young children’s social helpfulness
Jonathan S. Beier
Brandon F. Terrizzi
Amanda M. Woodward
Emma G. Larson
University of Maryland, College Park
Acknowledgements: We thank Kristen A. Dunfield and Lea R. Dougherty for discussion,
Jody Herron and Casey Trimpin for help with data collection, and the many
undergraduate members of the UMD Lab for Early Social Cognition who contributed to
this work. We thank the children and their parents for their participation.
Corresponding Author Information:
Jonathan S. Beier
Department of Psychology
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20742
Email: jsbeier@umd.edu!
!
!
!
!!
Final!manuscript!accepted!for!
publication!in!
Child&Development!
!
August!2016!

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
2!
!
Abstract
This study examined social influences on 3-year-old children’s decisions to help
an experimenter gain another person’s attention (N = 32). Children were slower to help
the experimenter when the target had previously expressed disinterest in attending to her.
Shy children were less likely to support the experimenter’s attempts to communicate with
the target; however, this association was not influenced by children’s knowledge of the
target’s disinterest and there was no relation between shyness and children’s support for a
separate physical goal. Therefore, young children’s decisions to act helpfully incorporate
consideration for others beyond a focal person with an unmet need, and they are further
constrained by children’s own comfort with the actions required to help.
Key words: prosocial behavior, helping, conflict, decision-making, shyness

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
3!
Young children regularly help other people. To understand why, researchers
investigate the abilities and motivations underlying their prosocial behavior in different
contexts (Brownell, 2013; Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2013; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Knafo-
Noam, 2015; Martin & Olson, 2015; Paulus, 2014; Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). One
consistent observation is that, during the second year of life, children begin to help others
achieve a variety of physical, action-based goals (Rheingold, 1982; Warneken &
Tomasello, 2006, 2007; Warneken, Hare, Melis, Hanus, & Tomasello, 2007). However, a
focus on the earliest instances of helping may neglect important developments in
children’s understanding of others’ frustrated goals, children’s prosocial motivations, and
the factors that influence their decisions to help.
In particular, adaptive helping decisions should incorporate two key social
considerations. First, how might supporting one person’s goal impact other people? If
doing so would negatively affect others, an action that is helpful to one person may still
be socially inappropriate. Second, would helping incur any personal costs? If others
disapprove of another person’s goal, helpers who support that goal risk negative
evaluation and social sanction. These considerations highlight issues that should
contribute to the subjective value of helping, yet their influence on children’s helping
decisions is unclear. This gap in our knowledge of children’s prosocial decision-making
exists because most investigations of early helping center on children’s support for the
physical goal of an isolated experimenter. Such scenarios minimize potential impacts on
others and risks to the child.

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
4!
Beier, Over, & Carpenter (2014) recently demonstrated that young children help
people accomplish goals directed at other people – a form of instrumental helping they
called “social helping”. After observing one person trying unsuccessfully to get the
attention of another individual, 3-year-old children approached the target individual and
redirected her attention back to the experimenter. Children thus provide instrumental
support for others’ social and physical goals. The primary difference between social
helping tasks and more conventional physical helping tasks is the nature of the goal (e.g.,
getting someone’s attention versus obtaining an object).
Because social goals target other people, social helping scenarios naturally
introduce the possibility of social conflict and personal risk to the helper. The target of a
person’s goal may agree or disagree with that goal. But are early social helping decisions
even sensitive to a goal’s compatibility with the preferences of its target? Young children
may lack the cognitive ability or inclination to consider how helping one person might
affect others. Alternatively, the slightest hint of social conflict might suppress children’s
helpfulness altogether. A third possibility is that children register potential social
conflicts, but base their decisions to help on a more nuanced assessment of the costs and
benefits of different actions. No research on early prosocial behavior has examined these
possibilities.
Another challenge of social helping scenarios is that they typically require helpers
to engage with others more extensively than physical helping scenarios do. For example,
encouraging someone to change their behavior may be more intimidating than handing
someone an out-of-reach object. Shy children, who already have heightened concerns
about receiving negative social evaluations, may feel this challenge most acutely. Despite

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
5!
ample evidence that temperament is associated with early prosociality (Eisenberg et al.,
2015), however, few studies have specifically assessed the relation between shyness and
helping. The available evidence is mixed: one study found a clear link between
preschoolers’ shyness and physical helping (Stanhope, Bell, & Parker-Cohen, 1987), but
another found that neither social fear nor a shyness/fearfulness composite was related to
toddlers’ physical helping (Gross et al., 2015). Because the risk of negative social
evaluation is highly salient when one must intervene upon a person who is the target of
another person’s social goal, a link between shyness and helping may be more evident in
social helping scenarios. Further, shy children may be particularly reluctant to help when
a goal’s target clearly disagrees with that goal.
To examine these issues, we adapted Beier et al.’s (2014) social helping scenario.
The testing session began with a conventional out-of-reach physical helping opportunity,
followed by a pair of trials in which an experimenter sought the attention of an
unresponsive target individual. In one trial, the reason for the target’s non-response was
ambiguous; she might not have heard the experimenter’s call or she might have been
ignoring it. In the other trial, her disinterest was clear. We also collected caregivers’
reports of children’s shyness.
We had two main sets of hypotheses. First, if children’s social helping decisions
incorporate the preferences of a target individual, they should be less eager to help when
the target is clearly unwilling (for infants’ detection of unwillingness within their own
dyadic interactions, see Behne, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2005). Second, because
shy children are more sensitive to the personal costs of incurring a negative social
response, we predicted a correlation between shyness and social helpfulness, and we

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
6!
expected this association to be stronger when the target individual was more clearly
disinterested in responding to the first experimenter. The physical helping task provided
an opportunity for two secondary considerations. First, to assess the specificity of
shyness’ putative effects on helping, we planned to compare the strengths of associations
between shyness and social versus physical helping. Second, as social helping is a new
area of investigation, if social helping rates were unexpectedly low, we anticipated using
physical helping as a positive check on our sample’s overall prosociality. Providing
continuity with Beier et al. (2014), we tested 3-year-old children.
Methods
Participants
Thirty-two 3-year-old children (12 girls, M = 38 m 4 d, SD = 34 d, range = 35;18
– 40;16) participated. Seven (4 girls) were tested but excluded: 2 due to parental
interference, 3 to child fussiness, and 2 to experimenter error. Children were recruited
from a database of families in the Washington, DC metro area who had volunteered for
research participation. Caregivers identified their children as primarily White (66%) and
Non-Hispanic (86%); family incomes ranged broadly, but the modal income bracket was
above $100,000 yearly.
Procedure
Setup. Two female experimenters played the roles of the Caller and Player.
Figure 1 shows the testing space layout. Caregivers sat in the far corner reading a
magazine, avoiding eye contact and interaction with the child. Four video cameras
recorded the session.

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
7!
Design. In a fixed order, children experienced a physical helping opportunity
followed by two social helping opportunities. The relative order of the two social helping
conditions was counterbalanced. The order of physical and social helping tasks was fixed
to preserve the possibility of using physical helping as a positive check on children’s
overall prosociality.
Shyness assessment. Parents completed the 20-item EAS Temperament Survey
for Children (Buss & Plomin, 1984) before the child participated, except for two who did
so 42 and 32 days after their appointments. The scale of interest was Shyness; the 5 items
are listed in Table 1. Internal scale reliability was acceptable, Cronbach’s alpha = .728.
Warm-up period. The session began with warm-up games (catch, toy cars,
placing stickers on each other; M = 6 m 12 s; SD = 106 s). As the warm-up concluded,
the Caller coughed and commented that she was losing her voice, providing a cover for
her later whispering. The Caller got into position for the three helping opportunities by
climbing laboriously over her desk. This emphasized the difficulty of re-entering the play
space.
Physical helping. As the Caller wrote on a piece of paper, the Player and child
looked inside a bin for a new game (2.5 meters from the desk). The Caller surreptitiously
dropped her pen onto the floor and reached for it unsuccessfully. While reaching, she
explained her goal with variations on “My pen!” and “I can’t reach it” for the first 30 s,
with the addition of “I need my pen to write something down!” for another 20 s. If the
child did not spontaneously retrieve the pen after 50 s, the Caller explicitly asked the
child to retrieve it. If the child did not help, the Player ceased searching for a game and
handed the pen to the Caller.

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
8!
Social helping. Next, the Caller switched to reading a picture book. The Player
and child played with a puzzle at the center of the room. During this play period, the first
social helping opportunity occurred. When the trial concluded, both experimenters
happily discussed the book for one minute, including the child in the conversation. This
re-established the Player’s interest in interacting with the Caller. Then the Player and
child played with building blocks. After 2 minutes, the Caller initiated the second social
helping opportunity.
In both social helping opportunities, the Caller attempted to get the Player’s
attention to show her images in the book. On both trials, the Caller “whispered”,
providing a possible reason why the Player did not respond (i.e., she did not hear her). In
fact, the Caller’s raspy voice was near regular volume and easily heard by the child. In
the Ambiguous condition, no further explanation for the Player’s non-response was
provided; plausibly, she could either be ignoring the Caller or simply not have heard her.
In contrast, just prior to the Not Interested condition, the Player made her disinterest in
the Caller explicit; thus, there was strong evidence that the Player was ignoring her. The
two trials were identical during the windows in which helping was measured.
This procedure diverged from Beier et al. (2014) in two notable ways. First,
because the current study centered upon a conflict between the Caller and Player, it was
important for them to be equals (previously, the Player was a puppet). Second, to lower
extraneous task demands, the child and Player engaged in parallel play around the same
toys during social helping trials (previously, the child had to disengage from a solo game
to approach the Player).

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
9!
Ambiguous (AM) condition. Throughout the test event, the Caller leaned over the
desk and called urgently to the Player, with arm outstretched (Figure 1). She followed a
schedule of four 20 s phases, offering increasing explanation of her goal. For the first 20
s, the Caller simply tried to get the Player’s attention, “Psst! [Player’s name]… over
here.” For the next 20 s, she also suggested that the Player could not hear her, “Psst!
[Player’s name], can’t you hear me?” For the next 20 s, the Player continued similarly,
additionally stating the reason for her goal, “Psst! [Player’s name], I have something to
show you!” At the start of the final 20 s, the Caller glanced at the child for the first time
and said, “Oh, [Child’s name] – I don’t think that [Player’s name] can hear me…” Then
she continued addressing the Player, occasionally glancing to the child. If the child had
not spontaneously helped by the end of the test event, the Caller explicitly requested
assistance, “Hey, [Child’s name], can you tell [Player’s name] that I need her?”
If at any point the child attempted to gain the Player’s attention, the Caller paused
her calling (but kept her arm outstretched) and the Player addressed the child, “What is
it?” If the child referred her attention to the Caller, the Player ended the test event by
turning turn toward the Caller, saying, “Oh! What is it?” If the child engaged the Player
but did not refer her to the Caller after 3 s, the Player returned to playing with her toys
and the Caller resumed calling to the Player.
Not interested (NI) condition. The test event in this condition was identical to the
Ambiguous condition. However, it was preceded by the Caller making two brief attempts
to gain the Player’s attention, “Psst [Player’s name].” After each attempt, the Player half-
turned and waved away the Caller, saying, “Not now, I’m playing” clearly but without
negativity. This manipulation took less than 10 seconds.

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
10!
Coding
A primary coder tagged key events on the videos using Datavyu software
(Datavyu Team, 2014). Physical helping was noted if the child handed the dropped pen
back to the Caller. For social helping events, the coder noted all verbal or nonverbal
attempts by the child to engage the Player or refer her attention back to the Caller, plus
any additional utterances. Successful social helping was noted if children both engaged
the Player (i.e., got her attention) and referred her toward the Caller. This could occur in a
sequence (e.g., tapping her shoulder and then pointing to the Caller) or simultaneously
(e.g., saying the Player’s name aloud while pointing). The coder was blind to the social
helping condition.
Ordinal social helping scores were derived from the point during a test event in
which any successful social helping occurred (Svetlova et al., 2010). Helping during the
first 20 s interval earned the maximal score of 5; during the second, third, and fourth
intervals earned a 4, 3, and 2, respectively; after the Caller’s explicit request earned a 1.
A score of 0 indicated no help at all.
Half of participants were double-coded, with near-perfect agreement. Coders
agreed perfectly on the presence of helping during the physical helping opportunity and
the Ambiguous social helping condition (Cohen’s kappas = 1); for the Not Interested
condition one disagreement was resolved through discussion (Cohen’s kappa = .846).
Examining just those children who performed a successful social helping response,
coders had 100% agreement on ordinal social helping scores in both conditions.

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
11!
Results
Preliminary analyses revealed no effect of sex or interactions involving sex and
condition. Sex was not considered further.
Consistent with prior studies (e.g., Warneken & Tomasello, 2013), 81.3% of
children spontaneously provided physical help. For social helping tasks, spontaneous
helping was 59.4% (Ambiguous condition) and 43.8% (Not Interested condition).
Physical helping occurred quickly (5.4 s), with longer latencies for the Ambiguous (28.6
s) and Not Interested (45.9 s) conditions. Median social helping scores were higher in the
Ambiguous than Not Interested condition (2.5 versus 1.0). See Table 2 for details.
During the physical helping event, only one child commented on the dropped pen
to the Player (who did not respond). During the social helping events, many children
interacted with the Player by touching her, talking to her, or moving directly within her
field of view. In addition to children whose first engagement with the Player led to
referring her to the Caller (Ambiguous condition: 17 children; Not Interested condition: 8
children), others simply engaged her for personal reasons, such as commenting on their
activity or continuing to play with her (AM: 8; NI: 13).
Children’s social helping behaviors were clear and well organized, utilizing a
range of strategies to direct the Player’s attention back to the Caller. Children first
engaged the Caller by addressing her verbally (Ambiguous: 3 children, Not Interested: 1
child), moving within her view (AM: 1), touching her (AM: 2; NI: 2), or touching her as
they entered her view (AM: 1; NI: 1); the remaining children produced verbal references
not requiring prior engagement. Children’s reference behaviors included pointing
gestures produced after establishing visual engagement (AM: 3), points in conjunction

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
12!
with deictic gaze (i.e., looks provided for the Player, switching between Player and
Caller; AM: 3; NI: 3), verbal reference alone (AM: 4; NI: 3), verbal reference in
conjunction with deictic gaze (AM: 1) or points (AM: 5; NI: 4), or a simultaneous
combination of verbal reference, points, and deictic gaze (AM: 3; NI: 4).
Our first main aim was to determine whether children’s social helping decisions
would be influenced by evidence of the Player’s disinterest. Children’s overall levels of
help (i.e., both spontaneous and requested) did not differ between the Ambiguous and
Not Interested conditions, McNemar test, p = .625; nor did their levels of spontaneous
help alone, McNemar test, p = .125. However, children’s social helping scores were
higher in the Ambiguous than Not Interested condition, Wilcoxon signed ranks, Z = 2.63,
p = .008, r = .33, indicating quicker, more spontaneous helping. Children had higher
helping scores in the Ambiguous than the Not Interested condition for both orders
(Ambiguous first: median = 3 and 2; Not Interested first: median = 2 and 1); however,
this difference was only significant when the Not Interested condition came first,
Wilcoxon signed ranks, ZNI-first = 2.69, p = .007, r = .70, ZAM-first = .85, p = .40, r = .21.
Figure 2 presents histograms of the social helping scores. Most often, children in
the Ambiguous condition informed the Player about the Caller quickly or not at all. The
most common responses in the Not Interested condition were either to help upon explicit
request or not at all. Children in the Ambiguous condition were more likely to help
during the first calling phase than those in the Not Interested condition, McNemar test, p
= .008.
Several children explained the Player’s non-response to the Caller by clearly
stating the Player’s activities or priorities, an unpredicted but noteworthy behavior. For

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
13!
instance, one child said, “She’s not listening to you. She’s playing blocks. She’s trying to
build a store.” This occurred marginally more often in the Not Interested condition,
McNemar test, p = .07; seven did so exclusively in the Not Interested condition, one did
the reverse, and one did so in both conditions.
Our second main aim was to examine associations between individual differences
in shyness and variation in social helping. In both social helping conditions, shy children
had lower social helping scores, Spearman correlations: rAM = -.41, p = .021; rNI = -.41, p
= .020. The strengths of these correlations were similar across conditions, p = .99 (Meng,
Rosenthal, & Rubin, 1992). Partial-order correlations controlling for order showed
identical results.
We also conducted three point-biserial correlations to determine whether or not
children’s shyness was associated with the presence of spontaneous helping (i.e., helping
prior to request versus helping on request or not at all) for each task. These analyses
permitted side-by-side comparisons between the social helping conditions and physical
helping condition (which was not designed to yield an ordinal helping score). Shyness
was not significantly correlated with the presence of spontaneous physical helping, r = -
.21, p = .256, but it was significantly correlated with the presence of spontaneous social
helping in both conditions, rAM = -.48, p = .006; rNI = -.45, p = .010.
Discussion
This study demonstrates that young children’s social helpfulness reflects
consideration for others beyond the person who needs help. When an experimenter (the
Caller) tried unsuccessfully to get another person’s attention (the Player), children’s
decisions to help were guided by knowledge of the Player’s social preferences and their

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
14!
own comfort with the actions that helping required. These findings highlight the broad
range of contextual and personal factors that contribute to children’s prosocial behavior,
leading to more adaptive social decisions.
When the Player’s disinterest in attending to the Caller was made clear, children
were slower to encourage her to respond. Children thus recognized that helping the Caller
would impact the Player and that the Player’s social preferences were relevant to their
helping decisions. An interesting question for future research is whether children
explicitly represented the incompatibility between the Caller’s goal and the Player’s
preferences or whether their sensitivity to this conflict arose implicitly from the challenge
of resolving multiple behavioral motivations (i.e., helping the Caller and respecting the
Player’s wishes).
Receiving a clear statement of the Player’s disinterest may have influenced
children’s behavior in several ways. Possibilities for delayed helping include an
internalized value of respect for others’ preferences, learned rules about interrupting
others, and self-protective motivations. Additionally, children may have simply been
averse to approaching the unwilling Player, or they may also have anticipated some of the
negative consequences of overriding her preference and exacerbating her conflict with
the Caller. Viewed within a decision-making framework (e.g., Gęsiarz & Crocket, 2015),
the present study shows that children place a negative value on intervening on a
disinterested Player, but it cannot speak to the specific processes through which children
determine that value. Like prosocial tendencies more broadly (Eisenberg et al., 2015), the
subjective weight that children placed on the Player’s disinterest when deciding to help is

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
15!
likely the product of genetic factors, socialization at multiple levels, and the child’s
social-cognitive capacities and dispositions.
The present study does offer insight into children’s abilities to navigate the
conflict between Caller and Player, however. If one person’s goal is not supported
unanimously, a reasonable strategy might be for children to do nothing at all. Yet two
observations suggest that children responded to the conflict between Caller and Player in
a more active way. First, although children in the Not Interested condition were slower to
inform the Player about the Caller’s goal, many did so eventually. Most likely, children
were initially uncertain about how to balance the Caller’s and Player’s wishes. However,
the Caller’s ongoing efforts provided accumulating evidence for the urgency of her goal.
This information, as well as the Caller’s eventual request for aid, may have tipped the
balance of children’s social motivations in favor of helping the Caller. Second, rather
than intervene on the Player, a substantial number of children in the Not Interested
condition explained to the Caller that she was occupied. These children may have come
to the opposite conclusion than those just described. Believing that the Player’s
disinterest outweighed the Caller’s aims, they chose not to help the Caller. Instead, they
sought to relieve the tension by explaining to the Caller why her goal was inappropriate –
an act that benefitted the Caller overall, even though it did not support her proximate
goal. Together, these observations suggest that children’s decisions to help were based on
a nuanced assessment of different people’s interests, the urgency of their respective goals,
and a search for recourses that might dispel conflict altogether.
Children’s shyness was also associated with their provision of social help.
Shyness inhibits approach tendencies, particularly in situations with the potential for

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
16!
negative evaluation (Asendorpf & Meier, 1993). Consequently, shy children may find
social helping opportunities particularly intimidating. The absence of an association
between shyness and physical helping in this study is consistent with this proposal;
however, a direct comparison is limited here by both the fixed order in which physical
and social helping occurred and the less structured physical helping sequence (relative to
social helping, which featured increasingly detailed explanations). Nevertheless, we note
that children typically become increasingly comfortable with experimenters as a study
continues (Martin & Olson, 2015). Given the later placement of social helping trials, this
observation underscores the robustness of the association between shyness and social
helping.
Contrary to our prediction, the association between shyness and social helping
was similar across conditions. There are two complimentary ways to view this finding.
First, the possibility of the Player’s unwillingness to respond in the Ambiguous condition
may have been just as intimidating to shy children as the certainty of it. Second, shy
children may require positive evidence that their approach will be well received, and
neither condition offered this reassurance. For either account, it appears that shy
children’s reluctance to provide social help was based more on a disinclination to
approach a third party than a calculation of the odds of meeting a negative response.
Developmental research has convincingly demonstrated that children are
motivated to help others. The present study documents two ways in which children’s
social considerations may limit the expression of prosocial behavior, for socially
appropriate and adaptive reasons. To fully capture the range of considerations that

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
17!
underlie children’s prosocial decisions, researchers should continue investigating
children’s prosocial decisions in more varied, socially challenging contexts.

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
18!
References
Asendorpf, J. B., & Meier, G. H. (1993). Personality effects on children's speech in
everyday life: Sociability-mediated exposure and shyness-mediated reactivity to
social situations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(6), 1072-
1083. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.64.6.1072
Beier, J. S., Over, H., & Carpenter, M. (2014). Young children help others to achieve
their social goals. Developmental Psychology, 50(3), 934-40.
doi:10.1037/a0033886
Behne, T., Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2005). Unwilling versus unable:
infants' understanding of intentional action. Developmental psychology, 41(2),
328.
Brownell, C. A. (2013). Early development of prosocial behavior: Current perspectives.
Infancy, 18(1), 1-9. doi:10.1111/infa.12004
Buss, A. H., & Plomin, R. (1984). Theory and measurement of EAS. Temperament:
Early Developing Personality Traits, 98-130.
Datavyu Team (2014). Datavyu: A Video Coding Tool. Databrary Project, New York
University. URL http://datavyu.org.
Dunfield, K. A., & Kuhlmeier, V. A. (2013). Classifying prosocial behavior: Children's
responses to instrumental need, emotional distress, and material desire. Child
Development, 84(5), 1766-1776. doi:10.1111/cdev.12075
Eisenberg, N., Spinrad, T. L., & Knafo-Noam, A. (2015). Prosocial development. In
Handbook of child psychology and developmental science (pp. 1-47). Hoboken,
NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. doi:10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy315

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
19!
Gęsiarz, F., & Crockett, M. J. (2015). Goal-directed, habitual and pavlovian prosocial
behavior. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 9, 135.
doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00135
Gross, R. L., Drummond, J., Satlof-Bedrick, E., Waugh, W. E., Svetlova, M., &
Brownell, C. A. (2015). Individual differences in toddlers' social understanding
and prosocial behavior: Disposition or socialization? Frontiers in Psychology, 6,
600. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00600
Martin, A., & Olson, K. R. (2015). Beyond good and evil: What motivations underlie
children's prosocial behavior? Perspectives on Psychological Science : A Journal
of the Association for Psychological Science, 10(2), 159-75.
doi:10.1177/1745691615568998
Meng, X. L., Rosenthal, R., & Rubin, D. B. (1992). Comparing correlated correlation
coefficients. Psychological Bulletin, 111(1), 172. doi:10.1037/0033-
2909.111.1.172
Paulus, M. (2014). The emergence of prosocial behavior: Why do infants and toddlers
help, comfort, and share? Child Development Perspectives, 8(2), 77-81.
doi:10.1111/cdep.12066
Rheingold, H. L. (1982). Little children's participation in the work of adults, a nascent
prosocial behavior. Child Development, 114-125.
Stanhope, L., Bell, R. Q., & Parker-Cohen, N. Y. (1987). Temperament and helping
behavior in preschool children. Developmental Psychology, 23(3), 347-353.
doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/10.1037/0012-
1649.23.3.347

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
20!
Svetlova, M., Nichols, S. R., & Brownell, C. A. (2010). Toddlers’ prosocial behavior:
From instrumental to empathic to altruistic helping. Child Development, 81(6),
1814-1827.
Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young
chimpanzees. Science (New York, N.Y.), 311(5765), 1301-3.
doi:10.1126/science.1121448
Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Helping and cooperation at 14 months of age.
Infancy, 11(3), 271-294.
Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Varieties of altruism in children and
chimpanzees. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(9), 397-402.
Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2013). Parental presence and encouragement do not
influence helping in young children. Infancy, 18(3), 345-368.
Warneken, F., Hare, B., Melis, A. P., Hanus, D., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Spontaneous
altruism by chimpanzees and young children. PLoS Biology, 5(7), e184.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050184

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
21!
Tables and Figures
Shyness scale items
1
Child tends to be shy.
2
Child makes friends easily. (R)
3
Child is very sociable. (R)
4
Child takes a long time to warm up with strangers.
5
Child is very friendly with strangers. (R)
Table 1. Items for the Shyness scale of the EAS Temperament Survey (Buss & Plomin,
1984). (R) indicates reverse-coding.
Table 2. Frequencies, social helping scores, and latencies for children who provided help
prior to the Caller’s request.
Help%type Event Help On%Request No%Help median
mean SD mean SD
Physical Out,of,Reach 26 3 3 5.36 5.59
Social Ambiguous,Non>response 19 211 2.50 2.56 2.23 28.58 24.69
Social Player,Not,Interested 14 9 9 1.00 1.75 1.70 45.85 26.00
Frequency
Social%Helping%score
Latency%of%unrequested%help%(s)

Running!Head:!!SOCIAL!CONSIDERATIONS!FOR!HELPING!DECISIONS!
!
22!
Figure 1. The testing room setup, with a simulated Social Helping calling event.
Figure 2. Frequencies of social helping responses in the two Social Helping conditions.
!
 Not Interested
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Calling
phase #1
Calling
phase #2
Calling
phase #3
Calling
phase #4
Explicit
request
No
help
Calling
phase #1
Calling
phase #2
Calling
phase #3
Calling
phase #4
Explicit
request
No
help
Number of children
Social helping responses