Young Children's Understanding of Helping as Increasing Another Agent's Utility.

ABSTRACT: Instrumental helping is one of the paradigmatic "prosocial" behaviors featured in developmental research on sociomoral reasoning, but not much is known about how children recognize instances of helping behaviors or understand the term 'help'. Here, we examined whether young children represent helping as a second-order goal and take it to mean increasing the utility of another agent. In Study 1, we tested whether 12-month-old infants would expect an agent who previously helped to perform an action that reduced the Helpee's action cost. We found that while infants expected agents to act individually efficiently (Experiment 1C), they did not expect the agent to choose the action that maximally reduced the Helpee's cost compared to an action that reduced the cost less (Experiment 1A) or not at

SUBMITTER: Schlingloff-Nemecz L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11793198 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature