A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Development of Prosocial Behaviour in Infancy

Why do we give money to charity, comfort others who are in distress, or carry heavy boxes when our friends move to a new apartment? Understanding how prosocial behaviours emerge and what might promote or hinder their development in young children is an essential line of research because prosociality is a fundamental feature of our everyday interactions and crucial for the functioning of our societies. However, our current knowledge of early prosociality is relatively limited as most research on this topic has been conducted in Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic (WEIRD; Henrich et al., 2010) societies. In this thesis, I therefore aimed to examine cross-cultural variability in two key forms of infant prosociality and investigated how helping and sharing behaviours might be related to familial socialisation. Mothers from the UK and Uganda were asked about their parenting practices related to infant sharing and helping when their infants were 14 months old. At 18 months, the infants’ sharing and instrumental helping behaviours towards their mothers and an experimenter were experimentally assessed. This revealed significant cross-cultural differences in maternal socialisation of sharing and helping experienced by the UK and Ugandan infants at 14 months. Nonetheless, the likelihood of sharing a toy with an adult did not differ across the two samples of infants. The infants’ likelihood of helping an adult, on the other hand, was significantly higher for the Ugandan than the UK infants. Interestingly, the likelihood of infant sharing and helping did not seem to be associated with whether the potential recipient of resources or help was their mother or an experimenter. Overall, the findings revealed by these cross-cultural studies indicate that early sharing might be relatively impervious to environmental variation in socialisation, and that factors influencing cross-cultural variation in instrumental helping rates need further investigation.