Abstract
From early in life, children help, comfort, and share with other people. Recent research has deepened scientific understanding of the development of prosociality—efforts to promote the welfare of others. In this article, we discuss two key insights about the emergence and early development of prosocial behavior, focusing on the development of helping. First, children’s motivations and capabilities for helping change in quality as well as quantity over the opening years of life. Specifically, helping begins in participatory activities without prosocial intent in the first year of life, becoming increasingly autonomous and motivated by prosocial intent over the second year. Second, helping emerges through bidirectional social interactions starting at birth: Caregivers and other individuals support the development of helping in a variety of ways, and young children play active roles that often influence caregiver behavior. The question now is not whether but how social interactions contribute to the development of prosocial behavior. Recent methodological and theoretical advances provide exciting avenues for future research on the social and emotional origins of human prosociality.
After months of eliciting help from caregivers, infants begin to return the favor. By their first birthday, infants share toys and food with parents and can help in simple tasks such as handing back an object that has dropped out of an adult’s reach (Dahl, 2015; Warneken & Tomasello, 2007). During the subsequent months, infants become increasingly helpful in the lab and at home (Dahl, 2015; Svetlova, Nichols, & Brownell, 2010; Waugh & Brownell, 2017), become more likely to comfort other people in distress (Svetlova et al., 2010; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992), and more frequently and willingly share toys or food with another person in need (Brownell, Iesue, Nichols, & Svetlova, 2013). These developments ground the emergence of prosocial actions—actions motivated by a concern with the welfare of other people. What explains this remarkable transformation, from helpless neonates to helpful toddlers, forging the foundations of human prosociality?
One explanation is that helping, sharing, and comforting behaviors develop through everyday social interactions from birth: Without active participation in social activities, along with encouragement, demonstration, and other guidance from caregivers, infant helping would not emerge (Brownell & The Early Social Development Research Lab, 2016; Dahl, 2018a). An alternative view is that social experiences are not essential to the emergence of human prosociality but operate on top of an inherent altruistic motive to promote the welfare of other people. According to this second view, infants begin to help irrespective of what parents do. Once children have begun to help, parents may influence when and how often they do so, but parents do not contribute to the basic skills and motives underlying prosociality (Warneken, 2016).
Research in the past decade has yielded new insights about how parent–child interactions influence the origins of prosociality, challenging theories that grant limited roles to parent—or to children. This article centers on two important insights about how prosocial behavior emerges over the first 2 years of life and the social contributions to its precursors and early development. We focus on infant helping, as it is currently the most studied. First, prosocial behaviors are qualitatively transformed during the early years: Older children do not merely help more often, but they do so from different motives, in more complex ways, and in more challenging situations. Children’s motives for helping transition from social motives to participate in interactions (in the first year of life) to prosocial motives to promote other people’s welfare (which emerge over the second year). The second insight is that infants’ helping acts emerge amid rich, affectively positive social experiences involving participation in games, chores, and other cooperative activities with caregivers and other individuals, as shown by naturalistic research. Furthermore, experimental evidence demonstrates that social experiences causally influence infant helping from its developmental onset. Critically, these everyday interactions are bidirectional: Infants are not passively socialized by adults but instead play active roles, eagerly participating in social exchanges and eliciting support and guidance from caregivers geared to infants’ levels of competence.
Understanding how prosociality emerges and develops is relevant well beyond the theoretical debates of developmental psychology. By middle childhood, humans help, comfort, and share with others in ways that set us apart from other animals (Tomasello, 2014). Moreover, children and adults reason about prosocial actions, sometimes deeming prosocial acts obligatory (e.g., saving someone’s life) and other times deeming them wrong (e.g., helping someone steal; see Dahl & Paulus, 2019). If humans did not develop these orientations toward prosocial actions, our societies would be unrecognizable (Tomasello, 2014). Knowledge about how social interactions influence the development of prosocial behavior has implications for parenting practices—does parental encouragement matter, or is it detrimental?—and interventions aimed at increasing children’s prosociality.
Prosocial Behavior Is Transformed Over the Early Years
Despite behavioral similarities between infant and adult helping, there are profound psychological differences (Dahl & Paulus, 2019; Hammond & Brownell, 2018; Hay & Cook, 2007). Here, we focus on age differences in motivations for helping over the first 3 years. We draw a distinction between prosocial motives, which are motives to promote the welfare of other people, and other social motives, such as motives to engage in social interactions. We and other scholars have proposed that infants’ earliest acts of helping, which emerge in the first year, stem from a motivation to engage with other people rather than a prosocial motive to promote others’ welfare (Brownell & The Early Social Development Research Lab, 2016; Dahl, 2015; Dahl & Paulus, 2019; Hammond & Brownell, 2018; Malti & Dys, 2018; Waugh, Brownell, & Pollock, 2015). For example, for an 11-month-old, the motivation for helping a caregiver put toys away likely resembles the motivation for putting shapes into a shape sorter: Both activities provide opportunities to engage in a positive, reciprocal interaction with an adult. From this perspective, infants’ first acts of helping are not yet prosocial but instead developmental precursors of prosocial behaviors.
The first major developmental transformation in helping is from participatory acts without prosocial intent, evident by the first birthday, to acts motivated by prosocial intent, evident by the second birthday. Around the first birthday, infants help only during social interactions with other people; in most ways, these resemble playful interactions, such as give-and-take games with objects (Carpendale, Kettner, & Audet, 2015). Later in the second year, as infants begin to help more autonomously, they still help at their own leisure, at little cost or inconvenience, and often without showing signs of prosocial intent (Rheingold, 1982). Correspondingly, their helping is not very reliable. For example, 18-month-olds help in about half of laboratory trials, often opting to play or observe instead of helping an adult (Waugh & Brownell, 2017). By comparison, 30-month-olds are less likely to engage in unhelpful behaviors and far more likely to help.
Older toddlers not only engage in prosocial acts more readily, but they also do so more autonomously, with less overt prompting, support, and encouragement from adults (Brownell, Iesue, et al., 2013; Brownell, Svetlova, & Nichols, 2009; Nichols, Svetlova, & Brownell, 2015; Svetlova et al., 2010). By age 2, children sometimes help even before recipients have realized that they need help (Warneken, 2013) and appear concerned that other people receive help regardless of who provides it (Hepach, Vaish, & Tomasello, 2012). Indeed, from the time children are 1 to 4 years old, parents increasingly attribute concern with other people’s welfare as a motive for their children’s helping behavior (Hammond & Brownell, 2018). This motive for prosocial behavior becomes more prominent as children develop more advanced social and emotional understanding (Brownell, Nichols, & Svetlova, 2013; Nichols, Svetlova, & Brownell, 2009).
A second major developmental transformation occurs in the third year of life, as children acquire another new motive for helping: moral judgments about whether one should help, based on considerations such as other people’s welfare or known norms (Dahl & Paulus, 2019). In simple situations—for instance, helping someone who is hurt at little cost to oneself—most preschoolers judge that people should help (Dahl, 2018b). However, like adults, children are less likely to judge helping as acceptable if the recipient of the helpful act is trying to steal something (for a discussion, see Dahl & Paulus, 2019). Such moral considerations about right and wrong do not motivate prosocial behavior in infants and toddlers.
Helping Develops Through Social Interactions
Human infants are “ultrasocial” (Brownell & The Early Social Development Research Lab, 2016; Tomasello, 2014), which creates unique mechanisms of developmental change (Brownell, 2011). Importantly, it means that from birth, infants are especially open to learning through social exchange and that they themselves are actively engaged both socially and emotionally during routine interactions and caregiving. Although interactions involving peers or siblings also matter for the development of helping, perhaps especially for coming to understand other people’s needs (Zerwas, Balaraman, & Brownell, 2004), we focus on interactions with adult caregivers, which are central early on (Brownell, 2011). In the first months of life, caregivers respond to infants’ initiatives by feeding, comforting, dressing, transporting, and playing with them (Brownell, 2011; Richards & Bernal, 1972). 1 At the same time, infants attune to caregiving behaviors in ways that many parents consider helpful (Hammond, Al-Jbouri, Edwards, & Feltham, 2017). For instance, by 3 months of age, infants adjust their posture to anticipate being picked up (Reddy, Markova, & Wallot, 2013). In the second half of the first year, infants begin to participate as adults dress or bathe them, clean off surfaces, put toys away, and retrieve objects (Carpendale et al., 2015; Dahl, 2015; Hammond et al., 2017), and they begin to share toys and food with caregivers (see Hay & Cook, 2007).
Positive affect and encouragement co-occur with infants’ participation in early helping routines, supporting and maintaining helpful activities. From the beginning, infants’ participation in everyday caregiving activities, and later their efforts to help other people, are scaffolded by others: complemented, encouraged, guided, and praised (Fig. 1; Dahl, 2015; Pettygrove, Hammond, Karahuta, Waugh, & Brownell, 2013; Waugh et al., 2015). According to parental reports, infants who helped because it was fun were more likely to try to join in helping activities than infants who helped to get a reward (Hammond & Brownell, 2018). As a result of their social experiences, by the first birthday, most infants eagerly help and share with other people well before they possess prosocial motives.
Proportion of situations in which caregivers gave encouragement, thanks and praise, or both in response to infant helping as a function of infant age (data taken from Dahl, 2015).
Positive adult support has been shown to causally influence infants’ helping. In one experiment, infants were randomly assigned to receive either repeated encouragement and praise for helping or no encouragement and praise (Dahl et al., 2017). Infants then saw an adult accidentally drop a pen or other needed object on the floor and unsuccessfully reach for it. Among 13- and 14-month-olds, previous encouragement and praise made infants twice as likely to hand back the dropped object to the experimenter. Other research has provided further evidence about how caregivers contribute to the early development of infant helping (Pettygrove et al., 2013; Waugh et al., 2015), identifying mechanisms such as parents’ emotion talk (Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nichols, & Drummond, 2013), synchrony and shared positive affect (Cirelli, Wan, & Trainor, 2014), and imitation (Schuhmacher, Köster, & Kärtner, 2018).
Crucially, no developmental transition can be attributed solely to the actions of parents; parents do not instill prosocial motives or skills in passively receptive children. Instead, children also influence their parents (Kuczynski, Parkin, & Pitman, 2014). For example, children’s actions elicit positive or corrective feedback from parents, which in turn guides children’s behavior (Dahl, 2015; Dahl et al., 2017). Recent research has deepened our knowledge of how children elicit and influence caregiver behaviors related to prosocial behavior. Naturalistic research in the first year shows that helping commonly begins when infants are watching what adults are doing, whereupon adults encourage and assist them in joining the activity (Dahl, 2018b). Parents do not insist that infants participate in helping activities (Waugh et al., 2015) but rather support their participation when infants demonstrate interest. Over the second year, infants increasingly initiate helpful acts themselves, for example, trying to help parents with household chores. In turn, parents encourage and support such active efforts even though they are often unhelpful (Hammond & Brownell, 2018).
How adults support early prosocial behavior depends on children’s developmental level. For example, parents adapt their communication about helping to changes in infants’ social abilities; as infants’ social understanding and communication skills improve, parents point more and use more verbal messages to convey their intentions and expectations about helpful behavior (Liszkowski, 2018; Waugh et al., 2015). Praise and thanking for helping become less common during the second year (Dahl, 2015), possibly because caregivers begin to expect infants to help or because infants’ eager “helping” actually makes chores take longer (Hammond & Brownell, 2018; Rheingold, 1982). More subtle or abstract forms of parental guidance, such as references to needs, may become more influential as children become more skilled helpers during the subsequent years (Hammond & Carpendale, 2015; Waugh et al., 2015), building on the precursors and early forms of prosociality developed in infancy.
Conclusions and Future Directions
The past decade has yielded key insights into how prosocial behaviors emerge and develop early in life. First, the psychological underpinnings of prosocial behavior change over the early years. While helpful acts emerge in the latter half of the first year, these early acts are not motivated by concern for other people’s welfare. Rather, they occur during supported, affectively positive social interaction and caregiving activities, serving social motives. Concern for other people’s welfare develops over the second and third years of life and begins to motivate helping, comforting, and sharing, transforming such acts into truly prosocial behavior intended to benefit others (Dahl & Paulus, 2019). Later, evaluative judgments about whether it is right or wrong to help provide additional motives for prosocial behavior.
Second, it has become clear that infants’ interactions with parents contribute to the earliest developments in helping. Starting long before infants begin trying to help, parents guide and encourage their involvement in everyday activities in ways that support and promote the emergence of helping behavior. Moreover, interactions surrounding helping are bidirectional: Infants influence caregiver behaviors, for instance, by showing interest in or understanding of caregiver activities and social signals. Caregivers respond to such infant behaviors by encouraging infant involvement, and their guidance of helping activities changes as infants become more skilled and knowledgeable. From this perspective, human infants’ unique social environments, coupled with infants’ own unique sociality, can account for the appearance of prosocial behavior early in life. Contrary to some accounts, our proposal is that infants are not inherently prosocial but gradually develop prosocial motives through various types of bidirectional interactions in the first 2 years of life.
Current and past research provides exciting avenues for future research on the development of prosocial behavior. Recognizing that development involves continuous coaction across genetic, neural, behavioral, and environmental levels, and that “genetic and nongenetic factors cannot be meaningfully partitioned when accounting for developmental outcomes” (Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2010, p. 37), many researchers now agree that social interactions are central to the emergence and development of prosocial behaviors. This recognition compels the field to move past the question of whether social interactions contribute to prosocial development to ask how social interactions contribute, starting at birth and continuing across the life span (Brownell & The Early Social Development Research Lab, 2016; Dahl, 2018a). That is, we must better understand how the varied and subtle forms of social experience support the emergence of prosocial behavior and how infants contribute to and learn from those experiences. New technology has made this more feasible, for example, by providing video recording tools for naturalistic investigations of everyday interactions, alongside physiological and neurological techniques for studying the processes underlying the precursors and early forms of prosocial behavior (e.g., Dahl, 2018a). By combining methodological and theoretical advances in both homes and laboratories, researchers will generate new insights into how social interactions forge the emergence and development of human prosociality.
Recommended Reading
Brownell, C. A. (2011). (See References). Reviews the development of joint action with adults and peers in the first 2 years of life, showing how it supports the emergence of autonomous cooperative and prosocial activity.
Brownell, C. A., & The Early Social Development Research Lab. (2016). (See References). Reviews evidence and arguments for socialization as a primary mechanism in the early development of prosocial behavior.
Dahl, A., & Paulus, M. (2018). (See References). Discusses several qualitative changes in the development of children’s altruistic motivation.
Eisenberg, N., Spinrad, T. L., & Knafo-Noam, A. (2015). Prosocial development. In M. E. Lamb & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology and developmental science (Vol. 3, pp. 610–656). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. A comprehensive review of research on the development of prosociality from infancy to adulthood.
Hepach, R., & Warneken, F. (2018). Editorial overview: Early development of prosocial behavior: Revealing the foundation of human prosociality. Current Opinion in Psychology, 20, iv–viii. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.02.001. Reviews a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches to early prosocial development.
