Prosocial development across childhood: Towards a comprehensive mechanistic framework

Humans are a hugely social species, willing to share with, help and comfort others often with no immediate benefit. Such prosocial behaviour has been shown to occur throughout life and to begin very early in development. Scientists have been trying to understand how this critical human ability first emerges and develops during childhood, yet progress has been marred for several reasons: 1) a failure to differentiate between functionally distinct forms of prosocial behaviour; 2) the use of different methods to study prosocial behaviour; 3) a piecemeal approach and narrow focus on limited age bands.

Our collaborative project will remedy this through an integration of several projects focussing on an uncommonly large age range spanning early and middle childhood, and using a combination of both identical methods for all children as well as specific methods for subgroups to investigate how a variety of prosocial behaviours change over the course of childhood.

Our first joint project will focus on common and distinct mechanisms for two prototypical varieties of prosocial behaviour, namely sharing and helping across 3-7-years of age and which aspects of psychological development support the emergence and change of prosocial development. Using a so-called accelerated longitudinal design, which compares the same individuals across development, we are able to definitively study developmental trajectories of prosocial behaviour during childhood.

Importantly, this project will be carried out at all three sites (each 140 children; total 420 children), which will allow us to both analyse data together as well as test for replicability of observed effects.

Our second project tackles the important question of the challenges posed by different situations requiring children to be prosocial (i.e. understanding that someone has hurt themselves, realising what one could do, and being motivated to carry out that action). If a child doesn't offer to help in such a situation, this could be either because they do not understand the problem or because producing the response is difficult or distressing.

By using different prosocial measures varying in complexity and including hypothetical scenarios in 180 3-5-year old children, this project will be able to speak to the true nature of developmental change in prosocial behaviour.

Our third project focusses on the crucial role of socialisation in shaping prosocial behaviour in early childhood and how this is promoted by interactions between children and parents. This project will focus on the roles of quality of parent-child relationships, as well as the discourse used by the parents in their interactions. Looking at 138 children aged 4-6, this project will be able to look at reciprocal influences of child-parent interactions over time and thus tackle the critical question of developmental dynamics.

Our fourth project focusses on how children process the cost of being prosocial (i.e. giving up time or other resources) in 140 5-7-year olds. Importantly, this project will use brain imaging and computational modelling to look at the underlying neural process of how much children care about others, and how the extent of caring about others might influence the importance of self-regulation in children. This project will shed light on the neural mechanisms of prosocial development.

Using highly powered and optimal study designs adopting a comprehensive task battery of prosocial behaviour and underlying mechanism in a sample unprecedented in age range and size and linking this to dedicated subprojects examining distinct mechanisms at various points during child development, this collaborative project provides a step-change in our understanding of prosocial development. The wider societal contribution of this project is critical, as it is only when we understand the underlying mechanisms of prosocial behaviour and how they change over childhood, that we can foster and encourage its development.