Abstract
The exploratory study presented here examines children's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help. This social perception process necessarily precedes the decision to actively help others. Fifty-eight children aged between 5 and 13 completed three experimental paradigms. They were asked to look at black-and-white drawings and to indicate which ones showed somebody in need of help. A control task requiring children to differentiate between pictures of humans and birds measured general categorization abilities. This experimental design enabled us to consider confounding effects of children's developmental status and motivation and to distinguish them from specific need-of-help recognition abilities. As gender and age have been shown to influence social perception as well as helping behavior, we explored whether these factors also have an impact on need-of-help recognition. Children's response accuracies and response times (RTs) were analyzed. We observed clearly higher accuracy rates for younger girls compared to younger boys specifically in the need-of-help recognition tasks. For boys, an age-related performance improvement was found. Younger girls performed at a similarly high level as older girls and boys. No gender differences were observed for children aged over nine. This report provides first evidence that the developmental trajectory of children's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help differs for girls and boys.
Highlights
Helping is an important aspect of prosocial interaction in humans and to a lesser degree in primates (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006, 2007; Liebal et al, 2008; Dunfield and Kuhlmeier, 2010; Koski and Sterck, 2010)
As gender and age have been shown to influence social perception as well as helping behavior, we explored whether these factors have an impact on need-of-help recognition
We derived the variables of interest to our analyses from research assessing active helping behavior and its underlying motivation, as well as from studies investigating social perception, since the present report is explorative and the first to investigate children’s need-of-help recognition abilities in a controlled experimental setting
Summary
Helping is an important aspect of prosocial interaction in humans and to a lesser degree in primates (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006, 2007; Liebal et al, 2008; Dunfield and Kuhlmeier, 2010; Koski and Sterck, 2010). A few other studies have considered need-of-help recognition in the framework of Theory of Mind or attribution of intention All these studies assume that infants and young children understand when someone needs help in given (experimental) situations. This study explores children’s ability to recognize need-of-help In this way, it contributes to the discussion on different stages of prosocial action by separating children’s need-of-help recognition abilities from later stages, such as motivational processes, decisions, and active helping that have been considered before (e.g., Dunfield and Kuhlmeier, 2010; Hepach et al, 2012, 2013b). We derived the variables of interest to our analyses from research assessing active helping behavior and its underlying motivation, as well as from studies investigating social perception, since the present report is explorative and the first to investigate children’s need-of-help recognition abilities in a controlled experimental setting
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