from Part III - Development of Prosociality in Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2023
This chapter provides an overview of the similarities and differences in the development of prosociality across cultural contexts and examines the role of social cognitive and motivational factors in shaping cultural diversity. We focus on helping and sharing, examined most extensively across cultures. Low-cost helping and sharing show similar developmental trajectories and levels across cultures. Development of costly helping diverges across cultures in the second year. Costly sharing diverges around middle childhood, coinciding with children’s adherence to cooperative norms of their society. Social cognitive foundations of prosociality develop along similar trajectories, suggesting that diversity in costly prosocial behaviors is best explained by motivational processes. New research suggests that collaboration influences motivational processes, producing similar levels of costly prosociality across diverse societies. To identify the psychological and sociocultural mechanisms underlying human development, it is critical to merge deep understanding of the everyday lives of children with theoretically guided experiments.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.