The development of cooperation and morality

Cooperation and prosocial behavior

Contact: Marta Giner Torréns, Nils Schuhmacher & Joscha Kärtner

Current research has shown that children begin to act prosocially just after their first birthday. In our lab we focus on the factors that influence the emergence and development of prosocial behavior in the early years of life: In previous and current research studies, we observe helping behavior of children between 9 months and 3 years of age, and analyze related socio-cognitive, emotional and communicative skills.
Our findings indicate that children across cultures understand others’ needs from about 9 months of age. Furthermore, higher joint attentional skills and self-other differentiation in the second year help to explain the fact that different domains of prosocial behavior (i.e., helping, comforting, sharing, mutual engagement) are uncorrelated (domain-specificity).
In order to learn more about the motivation underlying early prosocial behavior, we analyze the influence of culture and socialization on prosocial development: To do so, we assess children’s prosocial behavior and (m)others’ socialization goals and strategies in different cultures (i.e., urban and/or rural samples in Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Ecuador and Cameroon).
So far findings indicate that early helping behavior differs between cultures and is associated with specific socialization strategies in culture-specific ways. For example, findings indicate that the way in which mothers scaffold task assignment has implications for the motivation underlying spontaneous helping: while helping in 2-year-olds seems to be motivated by a sense of interpersonal obligation in rural Brazil it is more a matter of personal choice in urban German middle-class samples. Similar findings come from a different study that shows that toddlers’ prosocial behavior is more strongly related to external expectations and regulation in middle-class families from Delhi as compared to urban middle-class.
In current studies, we focus on (i) the bidirectionality of parenting and prosocial development by longitudional, transactional and experimental research designs, (ii) the role of social learning in prosocial development, and (iii) more naturalistic approaches to assess prosocial development and the children’s lifeworld.

Selected publications:

Giner Torréns, M., & Kärtner, J. (2017). The influence of socialization on early helping from a cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
Schuhmacher, N., Collard, J., & Kärtner, J. (2017). The differential role of parenting, peers, and temperament for explaining interindividual differences in 18-months-olds’ comforting and helping. Infant Behavior and Development, 46, 124-134.
Giner Torréns, M., & Kärtner, J. (2017). Psychometric properties of the early prosocial behavior questionnaire. European Journal of Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication.
Köster, M., Cavalcante, L., Carvalho, R., Resende, B., & Kärtner, J. (2016). Cultural influences on toddlers’ prosocial behavior: How maternal task assignment relates to helping others. Child Development, 87, 1727-1738.
Köster, M., Ohmer, X., Nguyen, T. D., & Kärtner, J. (2016). Infants understand others’ needs. Psychological Science, 27(4), 542-548.
Schuhmacher, N., & Kärtner, J. (2015). Explaining interindividual differences in toddlers’ collaboration with unfamiliar peers: Individual, dyadic, and social factors. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1-14.
Kärtner, J., Schuhmacher, N., & Collard, J. (2014). Socio-cognitive influences on the domain-specificity of prosocial behavior in the second year. Infant Behavior & Development, 37, 665-675.
Kärtner, J., Keller, H., & Chaudhary, N. (2010). Cognitive and social influences on early prosocial behavior in two socio-cultural contexts. Developmental Psychology, 46(4), 905-914.