Causal Attributions of Helping as a Function of Age and Incentives

Abstract

PETERSON, LIZETTE, and GELFAND, DONNA M. Causal Attributions of Helping as a Function of Age and Incentives. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 504-511. Causal interpretations of story characters' helpful behavior were examined in first-, fourth-, and sixth-grade, and college-level students. Subjects heard stories featuring actors' anticipations of each of 8 different consequences for helping: negative external consequences (criticism, punishment), positive external consequences (praise, reward), reciprocity, satisfaction of norm-based expectations, empathy, and no reason specified. As predicted, knowledge of the actors' intentions permitted even the youngest subjects to discount the intrinsic motivation of actors who helped out of fear of punishment or criticism. Fourthand sixth-grade students and adults rated punishment as more coercive than criticism and both negative consequences as more coercive than praise and tangible reward. Adults made the finest distinctions between consequences for helping. They rated all actors as less intrinsically motivated to help than did the children, and saw those responding to empathy or whose motivation was undescribed as the most altruistic, followed by those anticipating receiving praise. Unlike their age-mates in similar studies, the first graders did not mistakenly attribute heightened desire to help to actors helping in the anticipation of reward, perhaps due to the simplified, single-story method or the information about actors' intentions, or both.