Prosocial development across childhood: Towards a comprehensive mechanistic framework

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Humans are a prosocial species, willing to share with, help and comfort others. Scientists have been trying to understand how this ability develops during childhood, yet progress has been marred for several reasons: 1) a failure to differentiate between functionally distinct forms of prosocial behaviour; 2) the use of different methods; 3) a piecemeal approach and narrow focus on limited age bands. Our project will remedy this through an integration of several projects focussing on an uncommonly large age range, and using a combination of both identical methods for all children as well as specific methods for subgroups to investigate how prosocial behaviours change over the course of childhood. Our first joint project will focus on common and distinct mechanisms for two prototypical prosocial behaviours across 3-7 years of age and which aspects of development support the emergence and change of prosocial action. Using an accelerated longitudinal design, we are able to study developmental trajectories of prosocial behaviour. Importantly, this project will be carried out at all three sites, which will allow us to both analyse data together as well as test for replicability of observed effects. Our second project tackles the question of the challenges posed by different situations requiring children to be prosocial. Children’s lack of helping could be either because they do not understand the problem or because producing the response is difficult or distressing. By using different prosocial measures varying in complexity and including hypothetical scenarios, this project will be able to speak to the nature of developmental change in prosocial behaviour.Our third project focusses on the crucial role of socialisation in shaping prosocial behaviour and how this is promoted by interactions between children and parents. This project will focus on the roles of quality of parent-child relationships, and the discourse used by the parents in their interactions. This project will be able to look at reciprocal influences of child-parent interactions over time and thus tackle the critical question of developmental dynamics.Our fourth project focusses on how children process the cost of being prosocial (i.e. giving up time or other resources). This project will use brain imaging and computational modelling to look at the underlying neural process of how much children care about others, and how the extent of caring about others might influence the importance of self-regulation in children. This project will shed light on the neural mechanisms of prosocial development. Using highly powered and optimal study designs adopting a comprehensive task battery of prosocial behaviour and underlying mechanism in a sample unprecedented in age range and size and linking this to dedicated subprojects examining distinct mechanisms at various points during child development, this collaborative project provides a step-change in our understanding of prosocial development.