How reasoning contributes to preschoolers’ prosocial development

推理如何促进学龄前儿童亲社会发展

基本信息

批准号：
10645706
负责人：
Audun Dahl
金额：
$ 6.55万
依托单位：
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2023
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2023-06-01 至 2025-05-31
项目状态：
未结题

项目摘要

Project Summary (Max 30 lines) From early childhood, children need to develop views about when to help others and when to refrain. In deciding whether to help, children often need to balance their personal concerns with their own interests against their moral concerns with the interests of a recipient. Children who never help others may become socially isolated, whereas children who always help others may be taken advantage of. Developing a discerning prosociality is therefore key to healthy development. The preschool years is a transformative period in prosocial development, when children’s household involvement increases in many communities and when they become more able to reason about competing moral and personal considerations. However, much prior research on prosocial development has examined stable individual differences, seeking to identify characteristics of children who, on average, help more than others. In contrast, much work on children’s moral reasoning and judgments has focused on situational variability—how children judge helping as okay in some situations but not others—rather than stable individual differences. The proposed research will test predictions of a model that incorporates insights from both of these research traditions by examining how individual stability and situational variability in evaluative reasoning about helping can explain stability and variability in prosocial behaviors. To explain how a discerning prosociality develops, the proposed model also bridges a second tension in the field: that between caregiver socialization and child autonomy. Research on caregiver socialization has often defined healthy development as consisting of children adopting the values and practices of their caregivers. By contrast, constructivist approaches have focused on how children scrutinize the values and practices of their caregivers, accepting some and rejecting others. According to the integrative model tested by the proposed research, children’s evaluative reasoning about helping develops through conversations with caregivers, who can draw children’s attention to either personal or moral aspects of the helping situation. To test key model predictions, the proposed research will involve naturalistic observations, structured interviews, and storybook conversations. Through these activities, the project will assess caregiver-child interactions around helping, as well as children’s prosocial reasoning, judgments, and actions in response to both hypothetical and actual events. An ethnically diverse sample of 150 4- to 6-year-olds and their families will be recruited to participate in one home visit and one virtual session. This initial study will test predictions of the basic scientific model about how preschoolers develop prosociality through reasoning. The findings will inform a larger intervention study aimed at leveraging everyday caregiver- child conversations to strengthen children’s healthy prosociality.

项目摘要（最多 30 行）从幼儿时期起，孩子们就需要形成关于何时帮助他人、何时不帮助他人的观点。在决定是否提供帮助时，孩子们通常需要平衡个人关切和自身利益从不帮助别人的孩子可能会违背他们对受助者利益的道德担忧。社会孤立，而总是帮助别人的孩子可能会被利用。因此，辨别亲社会性是健康发展的关键。亲社会发展时期，许多社区儿童的家庭参与度增加当他们变得更有能力推理相互竞争的道德和个人考虑时。然而，许多先前关于亲社会发展的研究已经检验了稳定的个体差异，试图找出平均而言比其他人提供更多帮助的孩子的特征。关于儿童道德推理和判断的工作重点关注情境可变性——儿童如何在某些情况下判断帮助是可以的，但在其他情况下则不然——而不是稳定的个体差异。拟议的研究将测试一个模型的预测，该模型融合了这两项研究的见解通过检查评估推理中的个体稳定性和情境变化如何来遵循传统帮助可以解释亲社会行为的稳定性和可变性解释如何有洞察力。随着亲社会性的发展，所提出的模型也弥合了该领域的第二个紧张关系：照顾者社会化和儿童自主性的研究通常定义了健康。相比之下，发展包括儿童采用其照顾者的价值观和做法。建构主义方法侧重于儿童如何审视他们的价值观和实践根据测试的整体模型，接受一些并拒绝另一些。拟议的研究表明，儿童对帮助的评价性推理是通过与他人的对话而发展的照顾者，他们可以吸引儿童注意帮助情况的个人或道德方面。为了测试关键模型的预测，拟议的研究将涉及自然观察、结构化通过这些活动，该项目将评估看护者与儿童。围绕帮助的互动，以及儿童的亲社会推理、判断和回应行动假设事件和实际事件均由 150 名 4 至 6 岁儿童及其他们组成，属于不同种族。这项初步研究将招募家庭参加一次家访和一次虚拟会议。测试关于学龄前儿童如何通过以下方式发展亲社会性的基本科学模型的预测：研究结果将为旨在利用日常护理人员的更大规模的干预研究提供信息。儿童对话，以加强儿童健康的亲社会性。