How reasoning contributes to preschoolers’ prosocial development - 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.
