Prosociality, inhibitory control, social status, and group norms in children and adolescents: psychological and socioecological perspectives

Sociality (group-living) and prosociality (acting to benefit others) are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. However, humans have been claimed to be uniquely ultra-social and ultra-prosocial (or ultra-cooperative). In fact, the success of human kind is claimed to be due to our species’ ultra-sociality and this rests heavily on our hypertrophied prosociality. Prosocial (and antisocial) behaviours permeate every corner of people’s everyday life, which is inevitably and strongly social, and have an significant impact on the individuals’ welfare, health, psychosocial adjustment, and school and career success. A better understanding of the proximate (mechanistic) and the ultimate (evolutionary) processes that craft and fuel prosociality has become a major objective tackled by research programmes from numerous disciplines within the social and the natural sciences that deal with foundational and applied research questions. The approach adopted in the research reported here is mainly informed by developmental psychology, cognitive psychology and comparative (and evolutionary) psychology...