L9 - Prosocial behaviour and altruism

Question 1

REMEMBER to go over slide 3 for information on the last exam

Question 2

What is prosocial behaviour?

Answer 2

Voluntary behaviour intended to benefit another e.g comforting, helping, sharing, providing helpful information

Question 3

What is altruism?

Answer 3

Prosocial behaviour that is performed for unselfish motives - no benefit to oneself, even in the long run

Question 4

What does Eisenberg and fabes 1998 research show?

Answer 4

Much research shows that children engage in more prosocial behaviours with age

Question 5

What does Wareneken and Tomasello 2009 research show?

Answer 5

Studies nonetheless demonstrate altruism in infancy is not uncommon

Question 6

Defining prosociality - comforting

Answer 6

Addressing negative emotional state

Question 7

Defining prosociality - helping

Answer 7

Addressing instrumental need

Question 8

Defining prosociality - Sharing

Answer 8

Addressing material need/desire

Question 9

What does Zahn-Waxler et al 1992 research show (comforting)>

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Comforting - individual differences

Answer 10

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

Question 11

comforting summary

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Helping: assisting others defintion

Answer 12

A prosocial response to an instrumental need - ie trying to achieve a practical welcome

Question 13

Helping - informing others

Answer 13

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

Question 14

Helping - chimpanzees and bonobos

Answer 14

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)

Question 15

Promoting helping

Answer 15

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

Question 16

Promoting helping

Answer 16

Certain styles of caregiver behaviour predicted infants’ likelihood of helping another adult with differences depending on age

Question 17

How to promote helping with 18 months old?

Answer 17

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

Question 18

How to promote helping with 30 months old?

Answer 18

Scaffolding
Negotiation - finding a compromise

Question 19

What approaches didn’t help promoting?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Helping - summary

Answer 20

Infants actively help others by pointing and providing assistance
Caregivers play a role in promoting helpfulness
Non-human apes help others

Question 21

Sharing

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Sharing - affiliative sharing

Answer 22

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)

Question 23

Sharing - early resource sharing

Answer 23

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!”

Question 24

Sharing - fairness and reciprocity

Answer 24

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

Question 25

Sharing - great apes

Answer 25

Female chimps have been known to share food - Gruber and Clay 2016 but this is much more common in BONOBOS - Krupneve - they voluntarily hand food to others but not toys or tools

Question 26

Sharing summary

Answer 26

Infants share affiliatively by 1yr and start to share resources by 2yrs.
3-year-olds are typically self-maximising…
…but cross all cultures they tend towards fairness and disadvantageous inequity aversion by 5yrs
Self-maximisation, advantageous inequity aversion and strong reciprocity more culturally variable
Non-human apes share, but in more specific contexts

Question 27

Altruism

Answer 27

Acts motivated by the welfare of others” (Dahl & Paulus, 2018)
Prosocial behaviour can be for selfish purposes

Question 28

Altruism - evidence in children

Answer 28

Toddlers help each other even anonymously - Hepach et al 2013. They help whether the adult is there to watch or not or if they are familiar or not
2-year-olds remedy unnoticed accidents, like picking up a dropped object (Warneken, 2013)
Proactive rather than solely reactive prosociality
Even when engaged in an interesting task of their own

Question 29

Motivational sources of prosociality

Answer 29

Empathic concern (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1990)
A sincere concern for others’ wellbeing
Gratitude and guilt (Hepach & Vaish, 2020)
Gratitude sustains prosocial interactions and reinforces reciprocity. Guilt motivates repair of ruptured social relations
Obligation (Tomasello, 2020)
Commitments create a sense of social obligation; norms create an expectation of altruistic behaviour
Reward? (Warneken & Tomasello, 2008)

Question 30

Altruism - the impact of material reward

Answer 30

Warneken & Tomasello (2008)
1st phase
Children (20 months) had the chance to help an adult.
If they did, the adult provided a response:
Gave them a material reward
Praised them (“verbal reward”)
Responded neutrally (no reward)

In the second phase of the study children were again given the opportunity to help the adult - were lesss likely to reward condition - extrinsic motivator. praise did not function as a verbal reward - focuses on intrinsic motivation. highlights the importance of intrinsic motivation to altruistic action - undermined by extrinsic motivation