Sharing and caring: Prosocial behavior in young children around the world

Abstract

Young children around the world help others. Yet, the ways in which they help and the conditions under which they provide assistance differ by age and cultural context. Prosocial behavior can be defined as instrumental, empathic, or altruistic, or conceptualized as helping, sharing, or comforting. In this chapter, we explore the developmental trends and diversity behind young children's helpfulness. For example, instrumental helping is most common among younger children and empathic helping becomes more frequent with age; altruism is rare, likely due to its costliness. In addition to developmental patterns, a major focus of our chapter is the role of cultural context in shaping children's helping behavior. Although most of the laboratory research on children's prosocial behavior has been conducted in the minority world, the literature outside of those contexts reveals noteworthy crosscultural differences in a variety of domains including: what constitutes helping, the available opportunities to help, and the necessity of developmental milestones like self-recognition as precursors to prosocial behavior. Given that helping behavior is such a positive component of social relationships,we suggest circumstances that may promote helping across cultures like insuring there are sufficient developmentally appropriate opportunities to help and the role of cultural values (e.g., autonomy, relatedness). Lastly, we argue for the need to understand the mechanism(s) driving cultural differences, using the developmental niche to frame future research in this area.