ArticlePsychological research2020
Is young children's helping affected by helpees' need? Preschoolers, but not infants selectively help needy others.
Article in Psychological research, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Growing Communicators: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Toddlers' Communicative Intentions From Requestive and Expressive, to Information Seeking and Giving.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies · 2026Article
- Message Framing Effects on Helping Behavior as a Function of Age in Early Childhood and School-Age Children.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Young Children's Understanding of Helping as Increasing Another Agent's Utility.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Do Chinese preschoolers follow adults' suggestions? The impact of suggestion fairness and advisor familiarity on preschoolers' sharing behavior.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Competence-based helping: Children's consideration of need when providing others with help.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2021Article
- Prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. The role of responsibility and vulnerability.Heliyon · 2021Article
- Altruistic Giving Toward Refugees: Identifying Factors That Increase Citizens' Willingness to Help.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Why do preschoolers perpetuate inequalities? Theoretical perspectives on inequity preferences in the face of emerging concerns for equality.Developmental review : DR · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Infants and toddlers engage in instrumental helping, that is, help others in achieving an action-based goal. The underlying psychological mechanisms are unclear and hotly debated. The present study examined whether young children's helping is affected by others' need. To this end, 1.5- and 3.5-year-old children (n = 101) were simultaneously confronted with a needy and a non-needy other in a variety of helping tasks. The results show that the 3.5-year-old, but not the 1.5-year-old children preferentially helped the needy person. This suggests developmental changes in the psychological mechanisms underlying early instrumental helping. The results are explained by a developmental account according to which helping only gradually becomes an other-oriented and need-based behavior in the first years of life.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.