Young children want to see others get the help they need

Hepach, Robert; Vaish, Amrisha; Grossmann, T.; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1111/cdev.12633

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Young children want to see others get the help they need

MPS-Authors

There are no MPG-Authors in the publication available

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Hepach, R., Vaish, A., Grossmann, T., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Young children want to see others get the help they need. Child Development, 87(6), 1703-1714. doi:10.1111/cdev.12633.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0028-2CBC-A

Abstract

Children's instrumental helping has sometimes been interpreted as a desire to complete action sequences or to restore the physical order of things. Two‐year‐old children (n = 51) selectively retrieved for an adult the object he needed rather than one he did not (but which equally served to restore the previous order of things), and those with greater internal arousal (i.e., pupil dilation) were faster to help. In a second experiment (n = 64), children's arousal increased when they witnessed an adult respond inappropriately to another adult's need. This was not the case in a nonsocial control condition. These findings suggest that children's helping is not aimed at restoring the order of things but rather at seeing another person's need fulfilled.