Young Children's Understanding of Helping as Increasing Another Agent's Utility.

Abstract

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.