Dissociable Mechanisms for Diverse Prosocial Behaviors: Counting Skills Predict Sharing Behavior, but Not Instrumental Helping

By the preschool age, children exhibit a diversity of prosocial behaviors that include both sharing resources and helping others. Though recent work has theorized that these prosocial behaviors are differentiated by distinct ages of emergence, developmental trajectories and underlying mechanisms, the experimental evidence in support of the last claim remains scant. The current study focuses on one such cognitive mechanism – numerical cognition – seeking to replicate and extend prior work demonstrating the strong link between children’s numerical cognition and precise sharing behavior, and further examining its relationship to instrumental helping. In line with theoretical perspectives favoring the differentiation of varieties of prosocial behaviors, we hypothesize that numerical cognition underlies precise sharing, but not precise helping behavior. Eighty-five 3 to 6-year-old children completed two procedurally similar tasks designed to elicit sharing and instrumental helping behavior, in addition to a Give-N task measuring their symbolic counting skills. Despite the procedural similarity, and the implicit norm of providing half (5 out of 10) stickers in both tasks, children’s counting proficiency predicted precise sharing, but not precise helping. These results indicate a unique relationship between children’s developing numerical cognition and behavioral fairness, providing empirical support for claims that varieties of prosocial behavior are supported by distinct underlying mechanisms.