Being asked to help dampens the joy of doing good, according to children in multiple countries

A study of 6-11-year-old children across 5 countries found that children believed individuals are more willing to help and share when they decide to do so spontaneously compared to when it is requested of them. However, how much requests diminish this perceived willingness varied across cultures. The research was published in Developmental Psychology.

According to the Self-Determination theory, a widely used theoretical framework in psychology, humans have three basic psychological needs. Those are needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy means feeling that your actions are freely chosen and personally endorsed i.e., self-determined. Competence means feeling capable, effective, and able to master challenges. Relatedness means feeling connected, cared for, and significant to other people.

While being autonomous is very important for both well-being and maintaining motivation, humans are often in situations where they face external obligations, such as expectations to reciprocate other people’s deeds or respond to their requests. Such situations might undermine their need for autonomy and a sense of self-determination i.e., the sense that their actions are freely chosen. This may reduce their motivation to perform the requested actions. However, honoring obligations plays a central role in areas of human life that are essential for social functioning, including prosocial behaviors.

Study author Anneliese Skrobanek and her colleagues hypothesized that human cultures will vary in the degree to which children’s desires to help and satisfaction with the situation will differ in situations when they are requested to do something compared to situations when they are able to do that spontaneously. They expected that these differences would be higher in individualistic cultures such as those in Germany and the United States, than in cultures that are less individualistic such as Japan, India, and Ecuador.

These authors conducted a study involving 686 children from the five mentioned countries. 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 U.S. 40% of U.S. children were girls, and 58% of the Japanese children. In the other groups, girls were around 50% of the group.

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Children completed an online experiment which was, depending on the group, either unmoderated (using a pre-recorded virtual agent) or moderated by an experimenter. The experiment consisted of 4 stories (vignettes), each presented as three or four pictures. Each story started with introducing the story protagonist (e.g. a girl named Emma), proceeding with explaining the scenario (e.g. they see their mother cleaning the kitchen) and ended with a prosocial behavior (e.g., the protagonist helps the mother clean).

There were versions that included a picture showing the other character requesting help or prosocial behavior from the protagonist and versions without it. The study authors wanted to see whether children’s perceptions differ when there is a request to behave prosocially.

Overall, two vignettes were about helping in the household (with cooking and cleaning), and two were about sharing a common good (a spot on a swing and a spot to watch animals). Each child viewed 2 vignettes with a request to act prosocially (one helping, one sharing), and two without such a request. After understanding the vignette, the child rated whether the protagonist felt compelled to help/share, how much the protagonist wanted to help/share, and how the protagonist felt about helping/sharing.

The study authors found that children’s ratings of the desire to help in depicted scenarios depended on their culture. German, U.S., Japanese, and Indian children attributed a lower desire to help to the story protagonist when the character was requested to help than in scenarios where the protagonist helped spontaneously. Ecuadorian children’s ratings of the protagonist’s desire to help did not differ between the two conditions. The situation was identical with children’s ratings of the protagonist’s satisfaction with helping.

Children’s answers in scenarios that explored the desire to share and satisfaction with sharing followed a similar pattern. German, U.S., Indian, and Japanese children believed that the story protagonist was less willing to share and less satisfied with sharing when the other characters requested it, while Ecuadorian children rated the two situations equally. Further analyses revealed that children’s responses might depend on how much they have internalized prosocial norms i.e., norms that they should help and share.

“We find that obligations decreased prosocial motivation in children from populations with common denominators such as a higher SES [socioeconomic status], urbanization, and similar parenting values. Still, there is cross-cultural variation in the sensitivity to obligations. We provide the first evidence for the role of internalization of prosocial norms in the sensitivity to obligations.”, study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of prosocial motivation. However, it should be noted that study authors assessed children’s perceptions and feelings using single-item measures. This did not allow them to examine how reliable the responses are. Additionally, study authors note that the Ecuadorian group was the only group of children from a rural setting with a relatively lower socioeconomic status. Therefore, it remains unknown whether the observed differences are purely cultural or stem from differences in socioeconomic status and urbanization.

The paper, “Others’ Requests May Dampen the Desire to Do Good: The Effect of Requests on Children’s Prosocial Motivation Across Five Cultures,” was authored by Anneliese Skrobanek, Patricia Kanngiesser, Jahnavi Sunderarajan, Jorge David Mantilla Salgado, Saiwa Sisa Quimbo Yacelga, Shoji Itakura, Marie M. Morita, Masanori Yamaguchi, Nadia Chernyak, Lucy M. Stowe, and Joscha Kärtner.