L9 - Prosocial behaviour and altruism Flashcards
REMEMBER to go over slide 3 for information on the last exam
What is prosocial behaviour?
Voluntary behaviour intended to benefit another e.g comforting, helping, sharing, providing helpful information
What is altruism?
Prosocial behaviour that is performed for unselfish motives - no benefit to oneself, even in the long run
What does Eisenberg and fabes 1998 research show?
Much research shows that children engage in more prosocial behaviours with age
What does Wareneken and Tomasello 2009 research show?
Studies nonetheless demonstrate altruism in infancy is not uncommon
Defining prosociality - comforting
Addressing negative emotional state
Defining prosociality - helping
Addressing instrumental need
Defining prosociality - Sharing
Addressing material need/desire
What does Zahn-Waxler et al 1992 research show (comforting)>
The rate with which children comfort others who are in pain distress (rather than reacting with distress themselves) increases over the second year of life
Comforting - individual differences
Zahn Waxler et al 1992 observed young 94 MZ and 90 DZ pairs during 2nd year of life - recorded their reactions pretending to be distressed
Heritability estimates indicated that genetic factors have a modest role in explaining toddlers prosocial actions and concern. ZW suggest that genes might influence neurohormonal systems
This influences affective resopnses to others distress
Those who are not overwhelmed by the emotions they experience are more likely to feel sympathy
Those who are not overly inhibited are more likely to act on their sympathetic feelings
A child may struggle to process or act on emotions and thus seemingly show no concert
Clay and De wall - chimpanzees do comfort but at a later stage in development than humans
comforting summary
Infants increasingly show comforting behaviour between 1 and 2 years 0 by 3 years children show reasoned responsiveness to distress, individual differences in comforting may stem from differing affective responses to others distress
Helping: assisting others defintion
A prosocial response to an instrumental need - ie trying to achieve a practical welcome
Helping - informing others
Liszkowski et al., 2008
12-month-old infants help others by pointing informatively
E.g., when an adult didn’t see where a desired object went (versus when they did)
Communication helps others achieve instrumental goals (even without physical assistance)
Warneken & Tomasello (2006) demonstrated that 18-month-olds help others in simple tasks
In these tasks, the adult feigns a need for help
Helping - chimpanzees and bonobos
Chimpanzees also help in similar situations where it is easy for them to infer what the person’s goal is
There are some debates over chimpanzee prosociality, with the majority view being that chimpanzees (and bonobos) do display prosocial helping (Melis, 2018)
Promoting helping
Pettygrove et al. (2013) Caregivers promote helping behaviour using different methods
In the first phase, toddlers who were 1) 18 months or 2) 30 months helped their mother clean up
Maternal helping promotion behaviours were recorded
Children then had the chance to help another adult
Promoting helping
Certain styles of caregiver behaviour predicted infants’ likelihood of helping another adult with differences depending on age
How to promote helping with 18 months old?
Directives - commands or requests - ‘grab that toy’ can you get the toy’
Scaffoling - providing support such as emotional regulation, making child’s actions relevant in the activity
How to promote helping with 30 months old?
Scaffolding
Negotiation - finding a compromise
What approaches didn’t help promoting?
Reasoning - explaining the need ‘we need to tidy up to have space to play a new game - at 30 months children didn’t yet have reasoning skilled required
Praise - positive comments - perhaps too open ended but can contribute to self esteem
Character attribution - comments on child’s characteristics - may promote self esteem but not helpful
Helping - summary
Infants actively help others by pointing and providing assistance
Caregivers play a role in promoting helpfulness
Non-human apes help others
Sharing
Addressing other’s material needs/desires- even at a personal cost
Affiliative sharing
Resource sharing
Fairness and reciprocity
Cultural variation in these tendencies
Sharing by non-human apes
Sharing - affiliative sharing
Infants share attention and interest from around 6 months
They start to actively give objects from around 9 to 10 months (Salter & Carpenter, 2022)
This arguably sets the stage for notions of “mine” and “yours” (Zahavi & Rochat, 2015)
Sharing - early resource sharing
From around 18 months, infants start to share resources (e.g., food, toys)
Initially, this requires heavy scaffolding from adults (Brownell et al., 2013)
At 18 months this behaviour is
A) Not very common
B) Rarely spontaneous
C) Not very generous
By 24 months infants start to share…
More quickly
More often
With less prompting
More generously
Driven by increased social understanding
Between 18 and 24 months infants first start to say “Mine!”
Sharing - fairness and reciprocity
Around 3 years, children start to become more discerning about who should benefit from their acts of kindness
Olson & Spelke (2008): children think people should prefer to share resources with:
family and friends
people who have shared with them (reciprocity)
people who have shared with others (indirect reciprocity)
hildren show not only reciprocity (and indirect reciprocity) but strong reciprocity
Sacrificing resources to punish, as well as to reward (Robbins and Rochat, 2011 game based around coins (poker chips) that children could trade for small prizes - see bonus slides)
Blake, McAuliffe et al. (2015) examined attitudes to fairness from 4 to 15 years in 7 diverse societies
Disadvantageous inequity aversion emerged across all populations by middle childhood
Advantageous inequity aversion was more variable, emerging in three populations and only later in development
Question of how well children knew each other in different cultures
