Project Summary (Max 30 lines)
From early childhood, children need to develop views about when to help others and when to refrain. In
deciding whether to help, children often need to balance their personal concerns with their own interests
against their moral concerns with the interests of a recipient. Children who never help others may become
socially isolated, whereas children who always help others may be taken advantage of. Developing a
discerning prosociality is therefore key to healthy development. The preschool years is a transformative
period in prosocial development, when children’s household involvement increases in many communities
and when they become more able to reason about competing moral and personal considerations.
However, much prior research on prosocial development has examined stable individual differences,
seeking to identify characteristics of children who, on average, help more than others. In contrast, much
work on children’s moral reasoning and judgments has focused on situational variability—how children
judge helping as okay in some situations but not others—rather than stable individual differences. The
proposed research will test predictions of a model that incorporates insights from both of these research
traditions by examining how individual stability and situational variability in evaluative reasoning about
helping can explain stability and variability in prosocial behaviors. To explain how a discerning
prosociality develops, the proposed model also bridges a second tension in the field: that between
caregiver socialization and child autonomy. Research on caregiver socialization has often defined healthy
development as consisting of children adopting the values and practices of their caregivers. By contrast,
constructivist approaches have focused on how children scrutinize the values and practices of their
caregivers, accepting some and rejecting others. According to the integrative model tested by the
proposed research, children’s evaluative reasoning about helping develops through conversations with
caregivers, who can draw children’s attention to either personal or moral aspects of the helping situation.
To test key model predictions, the proposed research will involve naturalistic observations, structured
interviews, and storybook conversations. Through these activities, the project will assess caregiver-child
interactions around helping, as well as children’s prosocial reasoning, judgments, and actions in response
to both hypothetical and actual events. An ethnically diverse sample of 150 4- to 6-year-olds and their
families will be recruited to participate in one home visit and one virtual session. This initial study will
test predictions of the basic scientific model about how preschoolers develop prosociality through
reasoning. The findings will inform a larger intervention study aimed at leveraging everyday caregiver-
child conversations to strengthen children’s healthy prosociality.