Department of Psychology, University of Maryland.
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Dev Psychol. 2014 Mar;50(3):934-40. doi: 10.1037/a0033886. Epub 2013 Aug 12.
From early in development, humans have strong prosocial tendencies. Much research has documented young children's propensity to help others achieve their unfulfilled goals toward physical objects. Yet many of our most common and important goals are social--directed toward other people. Here we demonstrate that children are also inclined, and able, to help others achieve their social goals. Three-year-old children observed an experimenter trying unsuccessfully to get the attention of another individual and then helped by directing the 2nd individual's attention back to the experimenter. A control condition ensured that children's responses were not motivated by a general desire to inform the 2nd individual about interesting events. A 2nd experiment showed that children distinguish between fulfilled and frustrated versions of this social goal and help appropriately on the basis of this distinction. Young children are therefore willing to intervene in a 3rd-party interaction to help it along. This result expands the range of situations in which young children are known to spontaneously help others into the social domain, thereby underscoring the pervasiveness of their prosocial motivations and identifying a critical area for further research.
从早期发展开始，人类就具有强烈的亲社会倾向。大量研究记录了幼儿帮助他人实现其对物理对象未实现目标的倾向。然而，我们的许多最常见和最重要的目标都是针对社会的——针对他人。在这里，我们证明儿童也倾向于并能够帮助他人实现他们的社会目标。三岁的孩子观察到一个实验者试图引起另一个人的注意但没有成功，然后通过引导第二个人的注意力回到实验者身上来帮助。一个对照条件确保了孩子的反应不是出于普遍希望向第二个人告知有趣事件的动机。第二个实验表明，孩子可以区分这个社会目标的完成和受挫版本，并根据这个区别做出适当的帮助。因此，年幼的孩子愿意干预第三方互动以帮助其顺利进行。这一结果将幼儿自发帮助他人的情况扩展到了社会领域，从而强调了他们亲社会动机的普遍性，并确定了一个需要进一步研究的关键领域。
