Schlingloff-Nemecz Laura, Pomiechowska Barbara, Tatone Denis, Revencu Barbu, Mészégető Dorottya, Csibra Gergely
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria.
TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
Open Mind (Camb). 2025 Jan 23;9:169-188. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00183. eCollection 2025.
Instrumental helping is one of the paradigmatic "prosocial" behaviors featured in developmental research on sociomoral reasoning, but not much is known about how children recognize instances of helping behaviors or understand the term 'help'. Here, we examined whether young children represent helping as a second-order goal and take it to mean increasing the utility of another agent. In Study 1, we tested whether 12-month-old infants would expect an agent who previously helped to perform an action that reduced the Helpee's action cost. We found that while infants expected agents to act individually efficiently (Experiment 1C), they did not expect the agent to choose the action that maximally reduced the Helpee's cost compared to an action that reduced the cost less (Experiment 1A) or not at all (Experiment 1B). In Study 2, we examined whether three-year-old preschoolers (1) maximize a Helpee's cost reduction when prompted to help in a first-person task, and (2) identify in a third-party context which of two agents, performing superficially similar behaviors with varying effects on the Helpee's action options, actually helped. Contrary to our predictions, preschoolers did not help in a way that maximally reduced the Helpee's cost in (1). In (2), however, they indicated that the agent who reduced the Helpee's action cost was the one who helped. Taken together, these results support the proposal that, at least by preschool age, children possess a second-order utility-based concept of helping, but that they may not exhibit efficiency when choosing their own helping actions.
工具性帮助是社会道德推理发展研究中典型的“亲社会”行为之一，但对于儿童如何识别帮助行为的实例或理解“帮助”一词，我们了解得并不多。在这里，我们研究了幼儿是否将帮助视为二阶目标，并认为其意味着提高另一个行为主体的效用。在研究1中，我们测试了12个月大的婴儿是否会期望一个之前提供过帮助的行为主体采取行动来降低受助者的行动成本。我们发现，虽然婴儿期望行为主体能高效地单独行动（实验1C），但与降低成本较少的行动（实验1A）或根本不降低成本的行动（实验1B）相比，他们并不期望行为主体选择能最大程度降低受助者成本的行动。在研究2中，我们研究了3岁的学龄前儿童是否（1）在被要求以第一人称视角提供帮助时，会最大程度地降低受助者的成本，以及（2）在第三方情境中，从两个行为主体中识别出哪一个在对受助者的行动选项产生不同影响的情况下，表面上执行了相似行为，而实际上提供了帮助。与我们的预测相反，学龄前儿童在（1）中并没有以最大程度降低受助者成本的方式提供帮助。然而，在（2）中，他们指出降低受助者行动成本的行为主体才是提供帮助的一方。综上所述，这些结果支持了这样一种观点，即至少到学龄前，儿童拥有基于二阶效用的帮助概念，但他们在选择自己的帮助行为时可能并不表现出高效性。
