A study of 6- to 11-year-old children in five countries found that children believed people were more willing to help and share when they voluntarily decided to do so rather than when asked. However, the extent to which demands reduce this perceived willingness varies by culture. This research developmental psychology.
According to self-determination theory, a widely used theoretical framework in psychology, humans have three basic psychological needs. These are the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy means feeling that one’s actions are freely chosen and personally approved, or self-determined. Competence means feeling competent, effective, and able to overcome challenges. Relatedness means feeling connected, valued, and important to other people.
Although being autonomous is critical to both well-being and maintaining motivation, humans often find themselves in situations where they face external obligations, such as expectations to reward the actions of others or respond to their requests. Such situations can undermine their need for autonomy and sense of self-determination, that is, the feeling that their actions are freely chosen. This can reduce motivation to perform the requested action. However, compliance with obligations plays a central role in areas of human life that are essential for social functioning, including prosocial behavior.
Study author Anneliese Skrovanek and her colleagues hypothesized that, depending on human culture, children’s desire to help and satisfaction with the situation may differ when they are asked to do something versus when they are able to do it voluntarily. They expected these differences to be larger in individualistic cultures such as Germany and the United States than in less individualistic cultures such as Japan, India, and Ecuador.
These authors conducted a study involving 686 children from the five countries mentioned. The children were between 6 and 11 years old. In total, there were two groups of children from Germany, a group of 91 and a group of 125 children, 110 from Ecuador, 122 from Japan, 126 from India, and 112 from the United States. 40% of children in the United States were girls, compared to 58% of children in Japan. In other groups, girls were about 50% of the group.
Children completed an online experiment either unmoderated (using a pre-recorded virtual agent) or moderated by an experimenter, depending on group. The experiment consisted of four stories (vignettes), each presented as three or four photographs. Each story begins with an introduction to the story’s protagonist (e.g., a girl named Emma), proceeds to describe the scenario (e.g., sees her mother cleaning the kitchen), and ends with a prosocial behavior (e.g., the protagonist helps her mother clean).
There were versions that included pictures of other characters asking the protagonist for help or prosocial behavior, and versions that did not. The study authors wanted to see if children’s perceptions differed when they were asked to behave prosocially.
Overall, two episodes were about helping around the house (cooking and cleaning) and two episodes were about sharing common interests (a place to go swinging and a place to watch animals). Each child viewed two vignettes that included requests for prosocial behavior (one to help and one to share) and two without such requests. After understanding this scene, the child rated whether the main character felt obligated to help and share, how much the main character wanted to help and share, and how the main character felt about helping and sharing.
The study authors found that children’s ratings of their willingness to help with the depicted scenarios depended on their culture. Children in Germany, the United States, Japan, and India were less likely to want to help the main character in a story when a character asked for help, rather than in a scenario in which the main character volunteered to help. Ecuadorian children’s ratings of the protagonist’s desire to help did not differ between the two conditions. This situation was similar to children’s ratings of their satisfaction with the protagonist’s help.
Children’s responses in scenarios exploring the desire to share and the satisfaction of sharing followed a similar pattern. While children in Germany, the United States, India, and Japan believed that the main character in a story was less willing to share and less comfortable sharing when other characters asked for it, children in Ecuador rated the two situations equally. Further analysis revealed that children’s responses may depend on the extent to which they have internalized prosocial norms, or norms to help and share.
“We found that children in groups with common denominators such as high SES, urbanization, and similar parenting values had reduced prosocial motivation due to obligation. Yet, there are cross-cultural differences in sensitivity to obligation. We provide the first evidence for the role of internalization of prosocial norms in sensitivity to obligation,” the study authors concluded.
This study contributes to the scientific understanding of prosocial motivation. However, it should be noted that the study authors used single-item measures to assess children’s cognitions and emotions. This did not allow us to investigate how reliable the answers were. Additionally, the study authors note that the Ecuadorian group was the only group of children from a rural setting with a relatively low socio-economic status. Therefore, it remains unclear whether the observed differences are purely cultural or stem from differences in socio-economic status or urbanization.
The authors of this paper are Anneliese Skrovanek, Patricia Kangisser, Janavi Sunderajan, Jorge David Mantila Salgado, Saiwa Sisa Quimbo Yaserga, Shoji Itakura, Marie M. Morita, Masanori Yamaguchi, Nadia Cherniak, Lucy M. Stowe, and Yoscha Keltner.
