Lecture 4 Prosocial Behaviour & Altruism

Question 1

What is the definition of prosocial behaviour?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What is the definition of altruism?

Answer 2

• Prosocial behaviour that is performed for unselfish motives
  ○ i.e. has no benefit to oneself- even in the long run
  
  • Research shows that children engage in more prosocial behaviours with age (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998)
    Yet there is plentiful research that demonstrates altruism in infancy is common (Warneken, & Tomasello, 2009)

Question 3

What are the 3 components of defining prosociality?

Answer 3

1. Comforting, 2. Helping, 3. Sharing

Question 4

What is the definition for comforting?

Answer 4

Addressing negative emotional state, The rate with which children comfort others who are in pain or distress (rather than reacting with distress themselves) increases over the 2nd year of life (Zahn-Waxler et al. 1992a)

Question 5

Comforting- Individual Differences Zahn-Waxler et al. (1992b)

Answer 5

Observed 94 monozygotic and 90 dizygotic pairs during 2nd year of life
Recorded their reactions to adults pretending to be distressed

Question 6

Comforting- Individual Differences- RESULTS

Answer 6

Heritability estimates indicated that genetic factors play a modest role in explaining toddlers’ prosocial actions and concern
Zahn-Waxler suggested that genes might influence neurohormonal systems
This influences affective responses to others’ distress
Those that 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 concern or comforting (Holmgren et al., 1998).

Question 7

Comforting- Chimpanzees

Answer 7

• Chimpanzees (and bonobos; Clay & De Waal, 2013) do comfort/reassure others
  
  • But at a later development than humans (Bründl et al., 2021)
  • Part of understanding human prosociality may be when certain abilities emerge in development
• Not only ‘if’

Question 8

Comforting- Summary

Answer 8

• Infants increasingly show comforting behaviours between 1 and 2 years
  
  • By 3 years children show reasoned responsiveness to distress
    Individual differences in comforting may stem from differing affective responses to others’ distress

Question 9

What is the definition for helping?

Answer 9

Addressing instrumental need, a prosocial response to an instrumental need (i.e., trying to achieve a practical outcome)

Question 10

Helping- Informing Others, Liszkowski et al., 2008

Answer 10

• 12-month-old infants help others by pointing informatively
  ○ E.g., when an adult didn’t see a where a desired object went (versus when they did)
  Communication helps others achieve instrumental goals (even without physical assistance)

Question 11

Helping- Active Assistance, Warneken & Tomasello (2006)

Answer 11

demonstrated that 18-month-olds help others in simple tasks
- In these tasks, the adult feigns a need for help

- e.g. man has his hands full with magazines- trying to put them in a closed cupboard 
	○ The child helps him by opening the cupboard doors

Question 12

Helping- Chimpanzees and Bonobos

Answer 12

• 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 13

Promoting Helping Pettygrove et al. (2013)

Answer 13

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 14

Promoting Helping Pettygrove et al. (2013) PHOTO EXPLANATION

Answer 14

Certain styles of caregiver behaviour predicted infants’ likelihood of helping another adult- with differences depending on age.
-18 months—> directives (commands or requests e.g. “Grab that toy”, “Can you grab that toy?”
-30 months—> scaffolding (providing support such as emotional regulation, making child’s actions relevant in the activity e.g. rating scale 0-4)
-Negotiation—> finding a compromise “if you tidy up you can play with this new toy”

Question 15

What approaches didn’t help? (helping)

Answer 15

Reasoning. Explaining the need: “We need to tidy up to have space to play a new game.”
- At 30 months children don’t yet have reasoning skills (usually after 36m/3 years at least.

Praise. Positive comments. “Well done, great tidying!”
- Perhaps too open ended/generic- though may promote self-esteem

Character attribution. Comments on child characteristics. “You’re so good at helping!”
May promote self-esteem, but not helping

Question 16

Helping summary

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Sharing- Definition

Answer 17

Addressing other’s material needs/desires- even at a personal cost

Question 18

Sharing- Affiliative Sharing

Answer 18

• Infants share attention and interest from around 6 months (recall lecture 2)
  
  • 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 19

Sharing- Early Resource Sharing

Answer 19

• 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!”

Note- this sharing was in a situation with plenty of resources

Question 20

Sharing: Fairness and Reciprocity

Answer 20

• 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)
  • Children show not only reciprocity (and indirect reciprocity) but strong reciprocity
  • Sacrificing resources to punish, as well as to reward
  • The study of Robbins and Rochat (2011) set up a game based around coins (poker chips) that children could trade for small prizes
  • Two puppets, one generous, one stingy
  • Each “player” (child, 2 puppets) got to split up 9 coins
    ○ The generous puppet gave 4 to the child, 4 to other puppet, and kept 1
    ○ The stingy puppet kept 7, giving 1 to the others
  • 3-year-old children were self-maximising- taking most of the coins for themselves
  • This decreased and by 5 years children shared the coins more evenly (though giving more to themselves)
  • Children had the opportunity to punish a puppet
  • They could sacrifice one coin to get rid of 5 of the puppet’s coins.
    ○ By 5 years of age, children would consistently punish the stingy puppet
    Even at a cost to themselves!

Question 21

Is strong reciprocity a universal moral tendency?

Answer 21

Robbins and Rochat ran the same task with Samoan children- understood to be a more collectivist culture than the USA (understood as more individualist)

FINDINGS:
- Samoan children were less self-maximising (they took fewer coins for themselves)
- US children took more coins for themselves

- Samoan children were less likely to punish a puppet…
…and did not display the same strong reciprocity tendency to target the stingy puppet (at age 5yrs) Suggests that attitudes to reciprocity/fairness are modulated by cultural context

Question 22

Blake, McAuliffe et al. (2015) examined attitudes to fairness from 4 to 15 years in 7 diverse societies

Answer 22

• Pull the green lever= the sweets will fall into your bowl
• Pull the red lever and the sweets will fall into a bowl in the middle of the table
  • 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 23

Sharing- Great Apes

Answer 23

• Female chimps have been known to share food (Gruber & Clay, 2016)
  
  • But this is much more common in bonobos.
    Bonobos voluntarily hand food to others but not toys or tools (Krupenye et al., 2018)

Question 24

Sharing- Summary

Answer 24

• 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 25

Altruism- Definition/About

Answer 25

• “Acts motivated by the welfare of others” (Dahl & Paulus, 2018)
  
  • Prosocial behaviour can be for selfish purposes
    e.g. donating blood, an organ, food

Question 26

Evidence for Altruism in Childhood

Answer 26

• Toddlers help others 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 27

Motivational Sources of Prosociality

Answer 27

• 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 28

Altruism- The Impact of a Material Reward—> Warneken & Tomasello (2008)

Answer 28

Warneken & Tomasello (2008)

- 1st phase
	○ Children (20 months) had the chance to help an adult.

- If they did, the adult provided a response:
1. Gave them a material reward
2. Praised them (“verbal reward”)
3. Responded neutrally (no reward)

In the 2nd phase of the study children were again given the opportunity to help the adult
- Were less likely in reward condition- extrinsic motivator
- Praise did not function as a “verbal reward”- focuses on intrinsic motivation

Highlights importance of intrinsic motivation to altruistic action- undermined by extrinsic motivation

Question 29

Is altruism an innate tendency?

Answer 29

Warneken & Tomasello, 2009
- Yes, because infants display helping from early in development and extrinsic motivation inhibits helping behaviour

Dahl & Paulus, 2018
No, because early helping can be explained by a motivation for social interaction rather than altruism

Question 30

Overall Summary

Answer 30

• How do we account for the development of prosocial behaviour in human infancy?
  
  • How ought we to understand the evolution of prosociality?
  • The different components of prosociality may in fact be underpinned by distinct constructs
  • Despite being conceptually connected they do not correlate (Dunfield et al., 2011)
  • The innateness of prosociality and altruism is debated
  • Prosociality is not driven by a singular capacity, but is a multifaceted construct
  • Following Krupenye et al., 2018:
  • Strong prosociality hypothesis
    ○ Humans are prosocial; other apes are not
  • Versatile prosociality hypothesis
    ○ Humans display a range of forms of prosociality; other apes display particular facets
    This approach arguably offers a more nuanced approach to human-unique prosociality

Question 31

CORE READING ON LECTURE SLIDES