Repeated encouragement and praise causally increased 13- and 14-month-olds' helping of an adult who dropped an object¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2019 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Among 13- and 14-month-olds, prior encouragement and praise made infants twice as likely to hand back a dropped object to an experimenter, demonstrating a causal influence of adult support on infant helping. → Dahl A. 2019

Evidence¶

Dahl A. 2019¶

Dahl A., Brownell C. A. (2019). The Social Origins of Human Prosociality. Current Directions in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419830386

q3 · i? · review · r2

Randomized experiment (Dahl et al., 2017) cited by the review: infants were randomly assigned to encouragement-and-praise or no-encouragement conditions before seeing an adult drop an object. The review reports that "previous encouragement and praise made infants twice as likely to hand back the dropped object."

"In one experiment, infants were randomly assigned to receive either repeated encouragement and praise for helping or no encouragement and praise (Dahl et al., 2017)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Eighteen-month-olds help on about half of laboratory trials, often opting to play or observe instead of helping — related
• Parents' praise styles were stable across child ages 14-38 months, with person praise declining and other praise increasing — related
• Parents' naturalistic process praise at child ages 14-38 months predicts children's incremental motivational frameworks at age 7-8 — related
• Infant helping is transformed from participatory acts without prosocial intent around the first birthday to acts motivated by prosocial intent around the second birthday — related