title: Young children are intrinsically motivated to see others helped.
abstract: Young children help other people, but it is not clear why. In the current study, we found that 2-year-old children's sympathetic arousal, as measured by relative changes in pupil dilation, is similar when they themselves help a person and when they see that person being helped by a third party (and sympathetic arousal in both cases is different from that when the person is not being helped at all). These results demonstrate that the intrinsic motivation for young children's helping behavior does not require that they perform the behavior themselves and thus "get credit" for it, but rather requires only that the other person be helped. Thus, from an early age, humans seem to have genuine concern for the welfare of others.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. hepach@eva.mpg.de
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hepach
authors.forename: Amrisha
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vaish
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tomasello
mesh_terms: D001143:Arousal; D002652:Child Behavior; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006379:Helping Behavior; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology*; D012919:Social Behavior; D013564:Sympathetic Nervous System / Q000502:physiology*