What you really want: Two-year-olds prioritise ultimate goals when helping

Abstract

Toddlers are motivated to help others achieve their goals, but providing effective help also requires toddlers to consider what will be most helpful to another individual. Sometimes, helping requests provide conflicting information about an individual's goals, so we need to decide which information to prioritise in order to decide how is best to help. The current studies investigate how toddlers prioritise conflicting information about immediate and ultimate goals when helping. In Study 1, 2-year-olds were shown an opaque container of blocks (hidden blocks), a transparent container of blocks (visible blocks), and a colourful tube that plays music when a block is dropped inside. For half of the participants, both hidden and visible blocks played music but, for the other half, only the hidden blocks worked. A naïve experimenter asked for a block (immediate goal) to play music with (ultimate goal), and when both blocks were equally functional, we found that toddlers prioritised fulfilling the immediate request by providing a visible block; but when only the hidden block was functional, toddlers prioritising fulfilling the ultimate goal and helped by providing the functional but hidden block. Study 2 demonstrated that toddlers considered the experimenter's goal when helping, and not just their own attraction to the musical toy. This work adds to a growing body of literature investigating not only whether young children help, but also how young children reason when engaging in helping behaviour.