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Children's moral self-concept (MSC) has been proposed to relate to prosocial behaviour. However, systematic assessments of their inter-relations are scarce. Therefore, this longitudinal study investigated the development, structure and inter-relation of prosocial behaviours and the MSC in childhood, using three measurement points at ages 4, 5 and 6 years. We assessed children's MSC and helping, sharing and comforting behaviours in a laboratory setting. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-dimensional MSC structure at 5 and 6 years, but not at 4 years. There was inconsistent stability across time points regarding prosocial behaviour and MSC. For the comforting domain, but not the other domains, cross-lagged relations between self-concept and behaviour were present. Moreover, helping behaviour and self-concept were inter-related at 6 years. Results provide support for reciprocal associations between MSC and prosocial behaviour, albeit only in the comforting domain. They highlight the importance of distinguishing between types of prosocial behaviour and corresponding dimensions of the self-concept, as different developmental trajectories and associations emerge., (© 2024 The Authors. British Journal of Developmental Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society.)

Children's moral self-concept (MSC) has been proposed to relate to prosocial behaviour. However, systematic assessments of their interrelations are scarce. The current study examines the early development, structure, stability and interrelation of three key prosocial behaviours and the corresponding dimensions of the moral self-concept. To this end, we use a longitudinal approach with three measurement points during the preschool years at ages 4, 5 and 6 years. We assess three prosocial dimensions of children's MSC through a puppet-interview. In addition, behavioural measures of children's helping, sharing and comforting were administered in a laboratory setting. By examining the longitudinal associations between MSC and prosocial behaviours, this study will provide valuable insights into the complex nature of prosocial development in early childhood., (© 2023 The Authors. British Journal of Developmental Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society.)

Major developmental theories allot imitation a pivotal role in the cultural acquisition of social norms. Although there exists considerable evidence of young children's norm enforcement behavior, the ontogenetic emergence of normativity and the role of imitation is debated. Here, we assessed two pathways of how general imitation tendencies might relate to norm enforcement: The compliance path holds that young children's general imitation tendencies lead to displaying compliant behavior, which in turn predicts norm enforcement toward third parties. The internalization path suggests that young children's general imitation tendencies lead to an internal representation of normative rules. As children observe third parties' normative transgressions, a perceived discrepancy between internalized representation of the rule and observed behavior arises, which in turn triggers corrective action, that is, norm enforcement behavior. We assessed 18-month-olds' (N = 97) general imitation tendencies across four tasks, their compliance with maternal directives across two tasks, and their self-distress as well as protest behavior following normative transgressions. Results showed that (a) whereas imitation significantly predicted compliance behavior, compliance did not predict norm enforcement behavior, and that (b) imitation predicted self-distress, which in turn predicted norm enforcement. These findings speak to internalization as one psychological basis of norm enforcement behavior and highlight the importance of imitation in the ontogenetic emergence of normativity., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The moral self-concept has been proposed as a central predictor of prosocial behaviour. In two experiments (one preregistered), we explored the nature of the relation between the moral self-concept (explicit and implicit) and prosocial behaviour. Specifically, we investigated the role of emotions associated with prosocial behaviour (consequential or anticipated) and preference for consistency. The results revealed a relation between the explicit moral self-concept and sharing behaviour. The explicit moral self-concept was linked to anticipated and consequential emotions regarding not-sharing. Importantly, anticipated and consequential emotions about not-sharing mediated the relation between self-concept and behaviour. Yet, the relation was independent of preference for consistency. The implicit moral self-concept was neither related to prosocial behaviour nor to emotions associated with behaviour. Overall, our study demonstrates the interplay between cognitive and emotional processes in explaining prosocial behaviour. More specific, it underlines the link between the moral self-concept and prosocial behaviour and highlights the role of emotions about the omission of prosocial behaviour.

In the past year, an unprecedented climate movement has risen among European youth, so-called "Fridays4Future" (F4F). Thousands of pupils skip school every Friday to protest for better climate politics. The public debate on the protests contains highly mixed reactions, including praise as well as condemnation. Recent theoretical accounts propose that people's engagement in community service and actions towards a greater good could be related to their moral identity. Moral identity (MI) is defined as the extent to which being moral is important to the personal identity. The current preregistered study investigates the link between moral identity and participants' support for F4F in an online survey (N = 537). Results confirm the association between participants' moral identity and their support for F4F, with the internalization scale predicting passive forms of support and the symbolization scale predicting active forms of support. Additionally, risk perception was found to play an important role. Thus, this study confirms the role of moral identity in people's pro-environmental engagement and offers new insights in the context of an important and timely issue., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Recent research suggests that children's sharing behavior is affected by experiencing or observing others' sharing. These effects have been studied within research on the development of reciprocity and the effects of social modeling. In the current study, direct and indirect types of reciprocity and social modeling were assessed in 3- to 6-year-old children in three experiments (overall N = 382). In each experiment, we explored whether negative and positive social behavior were similarly paid back and forward in each of the different types of reciprocity. Moreover, we assessed the extent to which children reciprocated toward the protagonist who had performed the actual behavior and toward a neutral other. In Experiment 1, children experienced another's sharing behavior as recipients and could then allocate resources to this character and a neutral other. In Experiment 2, children observed another's sharing behavior and could then allocate resources to this character and a neutral other. In Experiment 3, children were asked to predict another protagonist's sharing in the same context as in Experiment 1. Overall, children treated the protagonist and the neutral other similarly and predicted others to do the same. Yet, they were more likely to reciprocate negative acts in indirect types of reciprocity. The results are interpreted with respect to the impact of observational learning and representational development on children's social behavior., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Contemporary moral philosophy stresses the idea of reasonable partiality. This concept proposes that close relationships carry a normative obligation to be partial toward another person. This study explored in two experiments whether 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 185) enforce partiality toward friends from third parties (Experiment 1) and how they prioritize a norm of equality and interpersonal obligations toward friends (Experiment 2). Children were presented with protagonists who could distribute resources between a friend and a disliked peer. One protagonist complied with a norm of partiality by allocating more resources to his friend, whereas the other protagonist either behaved in the opposite way (Experiment 1) or distributed resources equally (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, children enforced partiality by protesting against the protagonist who gave more to the disliked peer and by selectively affirming the protagonist who gave more to the friend. Yet, in Experiment 2, children showed stronger enforcement of a norm of equal sharing than partiality toward the friend. The study demonstrates how young children deal with normative demands in the context of friendship. At the same time, it suggests that fairness norms are given priority. Overall, our study demonstrates how young children handle normative demands and interpersonal responsibilities., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Reciprocity has been suggested to represent a crucial normative principle for humans. The current study aimed to investigate the normative foundations of reciprocity and the development of a reciprocity norm in young children. To this end, we presented 3- to 6-year-olds with three conditions. In one condition, a protagonist reciprocated sharing a large proportion of resources. In another condition, a protagonist reciprocated sharing a small proportion of resources. In a third condition, a protagonist did not reciprocate sharing a large proportion by giving rather few resources and, thus, violated a reciprocity norm. Results show that 5- and 6-year-olds endorse compliance with a reciprocity norm, which is reflected in their evaluations of the protagonists and their spontaneous verbal affirmation of reciprocal behavior. In contrast, 3- and 4-year-olds exclusively valued general prosociality, neglecting reciprocity. This indicates that children acquire a norm of reciprocity during the course of the preschool period., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Moral identity, or moral self, is the degree to which being moral is important to a person's self-concept. It is hypothesized to be the `missing link' between moral judgment and moral action. However, its cognitive and psychophysiological mechanisms are still subject to debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials to examine whether the moral self-concept is related to how people process prosocial and antisocial actions. To this end, participants' implicit and explicit moral self-concept were assessed. We examined whether individual differences in moral identity relate to differences in early, automatic processes [i.e. Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), N2] or late, cognitively controlled processes (i.e. late positive potential) while observing prosocial and antisocial situations. Results show that a higher implicit moral self was related to a lower EPN amplitude for prosocial scenarios. In addition, an enhanced explicit moral self was related to a lower N2 amplitude for prosocial scenarios. The findings demonstrate that the moral self affects the neural processing of morally relevant stimuli during third-party evaluations. They support theoretical considerations that the moral self already affects (early) processing of moral information., (© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press.)

A majority of current work indicates that the different types of prosocial behavior in young children (helping, sharing, comforting) are not related to each other. Here, I review recent studies that examined the relations between prosocial actions as well as the antecedents and correlates of the particular domains of prosociality. I argue that in addition to different social-cognitive demands also different motivations are involved in early prosocial action, and that prosociality is thus a concept that encompasses-at least early in development-heterogeneous behaviors and motivations., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Despite an increasing number of studies demonstrating that young children selectively learn from others, and a few studies of children's selective teaching, the evidence almost exclusively comes from Western cultures, and cross-cultural comparison in this line of work is very rare. In the present research, we investigated Japanese and German children's selective learning and teaching abilities. We found clear cultural differences. Japanese children were better at selectively teaching an ignorant person over a knowledgeable person than at selectively learning from knowledgeable others. By contrast, German children were better at choosing to learn from a knowledgeable rather than from an ignorant person than at selectively teaching ignorant others. The present findings suggest that the development of human learning and teaching, especially the tendency to take into account others' knowledge status, is strongly affected by cultural background. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Normativity is pervasive in everyday human social interactions and perhaps even constitutive of human forms of group and societal living. During the past decade, there has been increased interest in the ontogeny of normativity and the role that norms play in early social reasoning and behavior. Given the ubiquity of normativity, it is vital to investigate the development of children's normative understanding and behavior in a variety of different contexts, ranging from prosocial behavior to rational action or from linguistic competencies to cultural norms and values. Hence, in this special issue on the early development of the normative mind, researchers from different theoretical traditions have employed a number of different methods (e.g., third-party norm enforcement, judgment and reasoning, social behavior) to address different, yet related, research questions about the ontogeny of normativity. Here, we introduce the reader to the current debate and point to important research questions for the field., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Research has demonstrated that sharing with others is rewarding, suggesting a proximal mechanism of humans' extraordinary tendency to engage in prosocial behavior. The current study explored the cognitive basis of the relation between generosity and happiness early in ontogeny. We demonstrate that preschool children understand the relation between generosity and happiness. Moreover, our results show that children's emotion ratings are predictive for their subsequent sharing behavior. This finding provides evidence for the theoretical claim that prosocial behavior may be related to the anticipation of positive feelings, and that this mechanism may explain early instances of generosity in preschool children., (© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Recent work has suggested the presence of a variety of motives and mechanisms that affect young children's sharing decisions. Yet, little is known about the relative impact of these motives. In three experiments with 3- to 6-year-old children (total N=140), the current study contrasts two important recipient characteristics that have been suggested to play a major role in early sharing; the positive social relationship between children and recipients and the differences in recipients' wealth. To this end, children could allocate resources to a friend who already possessed a lot of them and to a nonfriend (Experiments 1 and 2) or a stranger (Experiment 3) who owned only very few resources. Across age, children showed a preference to share more with their rich friend, although this tendency was stronger in the older preschool children. The findings are discussed with respect to theoretical accounts on the psychological basis of early sharing., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Recent work has demonstrated that young children already engage in a variety of prosocial actions and evaluate the prosociality of others' behavior. A new study highlights the neural mechanisms that subserve perception and production of prosocial behavior in preschool children., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This study investigated the development of sharing expectations and sharing behavior in 3 groups of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. We examined (a) whether preschool children expect a person to share more with a friend than with a disliked peer and (b) whether their expectation about others' sharing behavior depends on whether there is a cost or not. Additionally, (c) we assessed children's own sharing behavior toward the different recipients in the same situation. The results show that expectations about sharing and actual sharing follow similar developmental pathways and that recipient-dependent sharing and sharing expectations emerge around 4 years of age. Moreover, individual-level analyses provide evidence that by 5 years of age, children's own sharing and their expectations of others' sharing are closely related to each other., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.)

To investigate whether preschool children would involve third parties in dyadic sharing situations, we created unequal sharing situations in which one agent had no resources and a child participant and a third-party individual had unequal resources. We analyzed children's tendency to share with the indigent agent and to involve the wealthy agent, whereas the indigent agent elicited sharing from them by means of progressive levels of request. The results showed that 5-year-olds involved the third party to a greater extent than 3.5-year-olds when they had fewer resources than the third party (Experiment 1). Yet, when 5-year-olds had the largest amount of resources, they were less likely to involve a third party but more likely to share themselves (Experiment 2). This study provides the first evidence that the tendency to involve third-party individuals in resource allocation situations develops at the preschool age and that it is based on fairness considerations., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The present study examined the neural processes related to different forms of prosocial behavior in infancy by means of a longitudinal study. At 14months, infants' resting state brain activation asymmetries were assessed by means of EEG. At 18months, we examined infants' instrumental helping, and at 24months infants' behavior in a comforting task. Behavioral analyses revealed a negative relation between infants' performances in the helping and comforting task. The EEG analysis showed that distinct neural patterns were related to each task. Greater left frontal cortical activation was associated with infants' understanding of the other's distress as well as empathic responding in the comforting task, whereas greater right temporal activation was related to infants' instrumental helping. These findings reveal the neural correlates of the earliest forms of prosocial action and show that different neurophysiological activation patterns are related to the emergence of instrumental helping and comforting in early development., (Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Early prosocial development has become a topic of great interest in recent years as experimental studies have provided evidence that instances of prosocial action can already be found in the second year of life. In this contribution, we review the recent literature on young children's production of prosocial actions, in particular helping, sharing, and comforting, and their understanding of others' prosocial behavior. We summarize the novel insights gained by recent studies and point to directions for future studies. Overall, we suggest that while the field consists of considerable knowledge about the developmental timeline of prosocial behavior, more research is needed to examine and better understand underlying social-cognitive mechanisms.