Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Dev Sci. 2025 Jan;28(1):e13569. doi: 10.1111/desc.13569. Epub 2024 Oct 7.
Although the presence of early helping behavior has been firmly established, it is unclear to what extent children are willing to adopt costs to help others, as well as how this willingness changes as children get older. Canadian 21- to 36-month-olds (N = 48) participated in four helping tasks varying in the type and degree of effort required to help (lifting force, cognitive load, the number of steps in a task, and pushing force). When costs were lower, toddlers were not only more likely to help but also provided help more readily and helped in ways that prioritized others' needs. Importantly, we found that age and how costly helping was to individual children each uniquely predicted high-cost helping, but not low-cost helping. Overall, we demonstrate that toddlers' helping is sensitive to a variety of effortful costs, while simultaneously demonstrating that maturation and individual costs appear to uniquely influence high-cost helping.
虽然早期助人行为的存在已经得到了确凿的证实，但目前还不清楚儿童在多大程度上愿意为帮助他人付出代价，以及这种意愿随着年龄的增长会如何变化。加拿大 21 至 36 个月大的儿童（N=48）参与了四项帮助任务，这些任务在帮助他人时所需的体力和认知负荷、步骤数量以及推助力方面有所不同。当成本较低时，幼儿不仅更有可能提供帮助，而且更愿意主动提供帮助，并以优先满足他人需求的方式提供帮助。重要的是，我们发现年龄和帮助对每个孩子的成本高低都可以独特地预测高成本的帮助，但不能预测低成本的帮助。总的来说，我们的研究表明，幼儿的帮助行为对各种费力的成本是敏感的，同时也表明成熟度和个人成本似乎会独特地影响高成本的帮助。
