Harvard University
University of Washington, Seattle.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2015 Mar;10(2):159-75. doi: 10.1177/1745691615568998.
Researchers have proposed different accounts of the development of prosocial behavior in children. Some have argued that behaviors like helping and sharing must be learned and reinforced; others propose that children have an initially indiscriminate prosocial drive that declines and becomes more selective with age; and yet others contend that even children's earliest prosocial behaviors share some strategic motivations with the prosociality of adults (e.g., reputation enhancement, social affiliation). We review empirical and observational research on children's helping and sharing behaviors in the first 5 years of life, focusing on factors that have been found to influence these behaviors and on what these findings suggest about children's prosocial motivations. We use the adult prosociality literature to highlight parallels and gaps in the literature on the development of prosocial behavior. We address how the evidence reviewed bears on central questions in the developmental psychology literature and propose that children's prosocial behaviors may be driven by multiple motivations not easily captured by the idea of intrinsic or extrinsic motivation and may be selective quite early in life.
研究人员提出了儿童亲社会行为发展的不同解释。一些人认为，帮助和分享等行为必须通过学习和强化来习得；另一些人则提出，儿童最初有一种无差别的亲社会驱动力，随着年龄的增长而下降，并变得更加有选择性；还有一些人认为，即使是儿童最早的亲社会行为也与成年人的亲社会行为（如声誉提升、社会联系）有一些共同的策略动机。我们回顾了生命的头 5 年儿童帮助和分享行为的实证和观察研究，重点关注了影响这些行为的因素，以及这些发现对儿童亲社会动机的启示。我们利用成人亲社会文献来突出亲社会行为发展文献中的相似点和差距。我们探讨了所回顾的证据如何影响发展心理学文献中的核心问题，并提出儿童的亲社会行为可能受到多种动机的驱动，这些动机不易被内在或外在动机的概念所捕捉，而且可能在生命早期就具有选择性。
