ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology2021
Competence-based helping: Children's consideration of need when providing others with help.
Article in Journal of experimental child psychology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mastery-Oriented or Outcome-Oriented Help? How Recipient Ethnicity and Task Difficulty Shape Children's Helping Behavior.Developmental science · 2025Article
- The effect of time pressure and ego depletion on young children's helping behavior.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- When Success Is Surprising: Children's Ability to Use Surprise to Infer Competence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Children perpetuate competence-based inequality when they help peers.NPJ science of learning · 2023Article
- Racial Stereotype Application in 4-to-8-Year-Old White American Children: Emergence and Specificity.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
When and how other people's needs influence children's helping is poorly understood. Here we focused on whether children use information about other people's competence in their helping. In Study 1 (N = 128 4- to 8-year-old children), children could provide help to both an incompetent target and a competent target by pushing levers. Whereas older children helped incompetent targets more than competent targets, younger children (<5 years) helped both targets equally. Two further experiments (N = 20 and N = 28) revealed that 4-year-olds understood that the incompetent person needed more help and also understood how they could help. Thus, young children do not, like older children, give more help to those who need it the most. We discuss potential developmental changes toward competence-based helping.
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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.