Helping in young children and chimpanzees shows partiality towards friends

Engelmann, Jan M.; Haux, Lou M.; Herrmann, Eva

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2019.01.003

Cited by 33 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 50 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For example, children exhibit enhanced sympathetic responses in situations in which a puppet “friend” is in need relative to an “acquaintance” puppet (Costin & Jones, 1992). Toddlers and even chimpanzees help familiar others more than unfamiliar ones in prosocial helping tasks (Allen, Perry, & Kaufman, 2018; Barragan & Dweck, 2014; Engelmann, Haux, & Hermann, 2019; see Wynn, Bloom, Jordan, Marshall, & Sheskin, 2018 for discussion). Three‐ to 5‐year‐olds share more with known others (i.e., friends) than less known others (i.e., acquaintances; Birch & Billman, 1986) and children as young as 3 also direct more resources toward friends and siblings than toward strangers in a giving task (Furman & Bierman, 1984; Lu & Chang, 2016; Moore, 2009; Olson & Spelke, 2008; Paulus, 2016).…”

Section: Children’s Understanding Of Social Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Children and Adults Take Social Relationship Into Account When Evaluating People’s Actions?

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Two studies examined whether children (5‐ and 6‐year‐olds; 8‐ and 9‐year‐olds, n = 214) and adults (n = 72) consider social relationship when evaluating unhelpful or helpful actions. Participants learned about a person‐in‐need who was (or was not) helped by someone they knew (a friend) and someone they did not know (a stranger). Older children and adults judged an unhelpful friend as meaner than an unhelpful stranger, and judged a helpful stranger as nicer than a helpful friend. Younger children did not judge an unhelpful friend as any meaner than an unhelpful stranger, and they judged a helpful friend as nicer than a helpful stranger. These findings suggest that a mature appreciation of how social relationship matters for evaluation emerges relatively late in development.

show abstract

Section: Children’s Understanding Of Social Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Children and Adults Take Social Relationship Into Account When Evaluating People’s Actions?

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In terms of the effects of friendship on helping, one study found that 3-year-olds were not only more likely to help a friend than a neutral peer in a forced-choice setting, but also demonstrated a greater overall motivation to benefit a partner if that partner was a friend, as measured in this case by the amount of paper shreds they helped to clean up [29]. In fact, even before the preschool age, infants have been shown to help more after being mimicked by a friendly adult [30], possibly because mimicking creates a social bond [31].…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Language thus guides children when choosing the person to affiliate with, to trust and to learn from. Earlier, we have seen that affiliation and group membership modulate children's prosocial behaviors [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] and that the status of another person as a native or a foreign individual influences sharing [36,37]. It seems plausible that linguistic group membership also modulates helping and cooperation [20].…”

Section: Language As a Natural Cue For Affiliation Learning And Prosmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of language on prosocial behaviors in preschool children

Somogyi¹,

Tran²,

Guellaï³

et al. 2020

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The present study investigated how linguistic group membership influences prosocial behaviors, namely helpfulness and cooperation, in preschool children. Whilst research indicates that children preferentially direct their prosocial behavior towards members of their own groups, the influence of perceived linguistic group membership on actual helpfulness and cooperation has not been investigated. We presented an experimenter to 4-and 5year-olds either as a foreigner, who did not speak the local language or as a native person. Children were then given the opportunity to help or cooperate with this experimenter in a series of nonverbal playful tasks. Whilst 4-year-olds helped and cooperated equally with the foreign and the native experimenter, 5-year-olds required significantly more cues and prompts in order to help or cooperate in the foreign condition. We also found that children were overall more reluctant to respond prosocially in the cooperation tasks than in the helping tasks. We tested children in two European countries (France and Hungary) and found the same pattern of responses in the two locations, suggesting that our findings are not specific to the local culture. Our results extend the findings of earlier research that showed selectivity according to the language spoken by the partner for sharing and imitation. Studies that looked at helpfulness or cooperation used the minimal group paradigm to induce group membership (based on arbitrary cues) and used indirect measures of prosociality, such as different forms of reasoning about the partner. In our study, we used language, a natural cue for group membership (versus arbitrary cues or cues based on social conventions) and directly observed children's helpful and cooperative behaviors toward the experimenter. Our results also confirm previous results indicating that with age, children become selective in their prosocial behaviors as they acquire new means of social evaluation and categorization. We conclude that the language associated with a potential social partner is not only a cue for affiliation and shared knowledge but also a cue mediating children's prosocial acts.

show abstract

“…However, there is some preliminary evidence to suggest that children’s behaviors with regards to friends may align with their friendship concepts. For instance, preschoolers act partially and prosocially toward friends over non‐friends: 3‐year‐olds choose to help friends more than non‐friends (Engelmann et al, 2019), and 4 to 6 year olds share more with friends (Moore, 2009), and trust their friends to keep promises and not spill secrets (Chin, 2014; Liberman, 2020). More directly, Paulus and Moore (2014) found correspondence between 5‐year‐olds’ individual sharing expectations and their sharing behavior.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Keeping friends in mind: Development of friendship concepts in early childhood

Afshordi

Liberman

2020

Social Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Friendship is a fundamental part of being human. Understanding which cues indicate friendship and what friendship entails is critical for navigating the social world. We survey research on 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children’s friendship concepts, discussing both classic work from the 1970s and 1980s using interview methods, as well as current work using simpler experimental tasks. We focus on three core features of young children’s friendship concepts: (1) proximity, (2) prosocial interactions, and (3) similarity. For each, we discuss how recent findings extend and expand classic foundations. Importantly, we highlight that children’s knowledge develops earlier and is deeper than initially hypothesized, and how children’s abilities are supported by early social inferences in infancy. We examine the implications of young children’s friendship concepts and note exciting new avenues for future research.

show abstract

Helping in young children and chimpanzees shows partiality towards friends

Cited by 33 publications

References 50 publications

Do Children and Adults Take Social Relationship Into Account When Evaluating People’s Actions?

Do Children and Adults Take Social Relationship Into Account When Evaluating People’s Actions?

The effect of language on prosocial behaviors in preschool children

Keeping friends in mind: Development of friendship concepts in early childhood

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About