With a Little Help From My Friends: Bystander Context and Children's Attitude Toward Peer Helping

This experimental vignette study examined children's perceptions and evaluations of helping a peer, in the context of friendships and in the presence of by-standing peers. A total of 1246 children (8 to 12 years) reported their attitude toward helping when either friends of the helper, friends of the recipient of help, or no bystanders were present. In agreement with the competitive altruism model, children most strongly endorsed helping when friends of the helper were present compared to the other two situations. This indicates that children take reputation concerns into account when evaluating helping situations. However, in contrast to lower prosocial children, the evaluations of higher prosocial children were not influenced by the presence of by-standing peers. These children seemed to base their evaluation on increasing the recipient's welfare and less on reputation concerns of the helper.     

In‐group bias in children's intention to help can be overpowered by inducing empathy

An experimental vignette study was conducted among children (8–13 years) to examine whether inducing empathic understanding is an effective intervention to overpower peer group boundaries in children's helping. Children were induced or not induced to empathize with the recipient of help, who was or was not part of their (imagined) group of friends. Results showed that children intended to help in‐group peers more compared to outgroup peers when empathic understanding was not induced. However, when empathy was induced, they intended to help friends and non‐friends equally. Inducing empathic understanding was effective independent of the recipient's level of need, and children's advanced social perspective‐taking ability. Encouraging children to imagine how a recipient of help feels might thus be a useful strategy to prevent peer group‐based biases in children's helping behaviour.