From early childhood, humans have a remarkable ability to help others achieve their goals. Observing someone in need can prompt children and adults to help, for instance by handing back a dropped object or volunteering at a soup kitchen. The tendency to help impacts all social groups, from societies to peer groups to families. The failure to provide help can hinder social functioning and, in some cases, have direct negative consequences to the wellbeing of others. This research will investigate the developmental origins of helping in the first year of life. Previous research has suggested that helping emerges around 8 to 10 months of age. Theorists have offered three different explanations for why infants begin to help others. According to the natural tendency view, infants have a natural tendency to help others that emerges independently of caregiver encouragement, praise, and other scaffolding. According to the socialization view, infants at first have no inclination to help but are requested to help by caregivers. Finally, the guided participation view proposes that infants show non-helpful interest in adults? activities and that caregivers guide this interest toward helping. The proposed research combines naturalistic observations and experimental methods to investigate how infants begin to help. Infants will participate in one naturalistic observation and one experimental session each week for 10 weeks. The study will begin when infants are 8 months old, crawling, but not yet helping. In the observational sessions, a researcher will videotape infants as they engage in their everyday activities. The first main question motivating the naturalistic component is how helping situations begin. That is, do infants at first initiate helping situations, as predicted by the natural tendency view, do caregivers initiate helping situations, as predicted by the socialization view, or do infants begin by showing interest in the caregivers? activities which is followed by caregiver scaffolding, as predicted by the guided participation view. The second goal of the naturalistic component is to investigate whether caregivers who provide more scaffolding for infant helping have more helpful infants, as predicted by the socialization and guided participation views, but not the natural tendency view. In the experimental sessions, infants will have the opportunity to help the experimenter with a new task. Half of infants will be randomly assigned to a scaffolding group and receive encouragement, praise, and other forms of scaffolding for helping, while the other half of infants will be assigned to a control group and receive no scaffolding. The goal of the experimental component is to determine whether repeated scaffolding increases infant helping, as predicted by the socialization and guided participation views, but not the natural tendency view. The proposed research will improve our understanding of how infants begin to help others by employing a new methodological approach to studying transitions in social development. The contrasting views of infant helping have diverging implications for how adults can stimulate or hinder the development of helping. In addition to informing theory and research about early social and moral development, the proposed research will form the basis for a larger research project investigating how to promote early prosocial development in at-risk populations.
The tendency to help others is both integral to children?s development and crucial to the functioning of families and societies. The proposed research investigates how caregivers can contribute to the emergence of helping during everyday social interactions in the first year of life. The scientific understanding of how children begin to help others can inform interventions designed to promote prosocial tendencies in young children.
| Dahl, Audun; Killen, Melanie (2018) A Developmental Perspective on the Origins of Morality in Infancy and Early Childhood. Front Psychol 9:1736 |
