Young children proactively remedy unnoticed accidents

Abstract

Human adults will sometimes help without being asked to help, including in situations in which the helpee is oblivious to the problem and thus provides no communicative or behavioral cues that intervention is necessary. Some theoretical models argue that these acts of 'proactive helping' are an important and possibly human-specific form of prosociality. Two experiments examined whether young children proactively help in a situation where an adult did not provide any concurrent behavioral cues that help was needed. Specifically, in Experiment 1 an experimenter either dropped an object without noticing (experimental condition) or on purpose (control). Even though children were bystanders engaged in their own task, they spontaneously intervened by helping instrumentally in the experimental condition in the absence of concurrent behavioral cues from the actor (significantly more often than in the control condition). These acts increased significantly from 21 to 31months of age, probably reflecting children's emerging social-cognitive capacities to represent goal-directed action. Experiment 2 replicated proactive helping in 2-year-olds in a more closely matched comparison in which in both experimental and control conditions the actor did not notice the accident, and children thus had to infer whether help was needed from the actor's previous responses alone. This result shows that children are able to infer a need for intervention on concurrent situational cues, without behavioral or communicative cues by the helpee. These results indicate that proactive prosociality might be a characteristic of early human ontogeny, emerging in children as young as two years of age.

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

“…Other experiments using these same scenarios showed that 18-month-olds helped even when they had to circumvent obstacles in order to do so , or when they had to temporarily stop playing with an interesting toy in order to help the experimenter across the room (Warneken & Tomasello, 2008). Yet other experiments revealed a marked improvement at about 2 years of age in the ability to infer, in the absence of explicit cues, that an adult requires help to achieve a goal (Warneken, 2013).…”

“…In an influential series of experiments, Warneken and his colleagues set out to explore the conditions under which infants engage in helping behavior (e.g., Warneken, 2013;Warneken & Tomasello, 2006Warneken, Hare, Melis, Hanus, & Tomasello, 2007).…”

Goal Slippage: A Mechanism for Spontaneous Instrumental Helping in Infancy?

“…First, Warneken (2013) found that 2 year-olds helped just as much in the absence of parental presence an encouragement-although the significance of this result should be qualified in light of Dahl's (2015) finding, discussed above, that encouragement and praise in helping situations at home may instill a belief in the children that they are expected to help. The next awkward finding is due to Warneken, who in a recent study (Warneken 2013) reported that 2 yearolds were just as likely to help when the helpee was not yet aware of the accident necessitating the help, and thus did not expect any help. This, like the Hepach et al (2016) report of anonymous helping discussed above, are not immediately reconcilable with the present conjecture about expectation.…”

“…Keywords Prosocial behavior · Helping · Altruism · Goals · Joint action · Common coding helping (Warneken andTomasello 2006, 2007;; Cf. ;Svetlova et al 2010;Dunfield 2014).…”

The psychology of primate cooperation and competition: a call for realigning research agendas

“…leaving the test situation could address this possibility. Children, by contrast, often provide help even when no such requests are directed at them [68,77], thus eliminating the sharing/helping under pressure idea.…”