Emerging Selectivity: Group Membership and Early Prosociality

Engaging in prosocial behavior is costly. By selectively directing prosocial behavior toward individuals with a high probability of reciprocating, we are able to offset these potential costs and maintain a sustainable prosocial system. Often, we determine whether an individual will make a good prosocial partner through the observation of their social behaviors. In the absence of such behavioral information, however, group membership can be an effective heuristic for guiding selectivity. Older children and adults show ingroup bias when engaging in selective social behavior, but studies with samples of children under the age of 4 years have been inconclusive. In part, this may be because studies have often relied on measures of prosocial behavior such as sharing or subjective liking, which are reliant on additional cognitive processes apart from selectivity considerations and which may still be undergoing development early in childhood. These tasks may mask younger children’s capacity for selectivity in the ingroup context. The present study recruited 65 2-year-old children with the aim to test the capacity for toddlers to demonstrate group-based selective behavior in a minimal group task. Results suggest that children of this age preference both minimal group members and unlabeled similar others over dissimilar individuals when directing their selective helping, but not sharing, behavior. In sum, the findings suggest that even toddlers have a developing sense of ingroup bias in selective prosocial behavior, and that helping, as opposed to sharing, may be a more sensitive measure of children’s group-oriented selective behavior at this age.