University of Münster, Germany.
University of Münster, Germany.
Infant Behav Dev. 2021 Aug;64:101603. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101603. Epub 2021 Jun 30.
What drives toddlers' helping behavior? And do toddlers' helping motivations change across time? In line with Dahl and Paulus (2019), we propose that initially, toddlers start helping in ongoing chores driven by their interest in social interactions, and, later on, their helping becomes more concern based, or based on a sense of responsibility. To test this assumption, we used a longitudinal approach to examine the role that social interaction plays in toddlers' motivation to help as they grow older. As such, we investigated whether a disruption to an experimenter during a shared chore task affected toddlers' motivations to continue helping at the ages of 18, 21 and 24 months. Results showed that toddlers at 18 months were less likely to continue helping when the experimenter was disrupted from the shared task, in comparison to toddlers at 21 and at 24 months. These findings support the idea that toddlers develop from socially based participators into more prosocially based contributors.
是什么驱使幼儿产生助人行为？幼儿的助人动机是否会随着时间的推移而改变？我们赞同 Dahl 和 Paulus（2019）的观点，即幼儿最初会因为对社交互动的兴趣而主动参与日常家务，之后他们的帮助行为会变得更加关注他人，或者基于责任感。为了验证这一假设，我们采用纵向研究方法，探究在幼儿成长过程中，社交互动在他们助人动机中的作用。具体而言，我们研究了当实验者在共同完成任务时被打断，是否会影响 18、21 和 24 个月大的幼儿继续帮助的动机。结果表明，与 21 个月和 24 个月大的幼儿相比，18 个月大的幼儿在实验者被从共同任务中打断后，更不可能继续帮助。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即幼儿从基于社会的参与者发展成为更具有亲社会意识的贡献者。
