A new study by an international research team, including experts in child psychology at the University of Plymouth, has provided the first systematic, cross-cultural comparison of how children help their peers.
Previous research has mainly focused on how children help adults, often within their own families, but peer interactions play an equally important, yet far less studied, role in children's social lives across many cultures.
To gauge this, researchers conducted a study with 336 children aged four to nine from six different cultural groups: Germans, Wichí (Argentina), ≠Akhoe Hai||om (Namibia), Samburu and Kikuyu (Kenya) and Quechua (Bolivia).
Spanning large-scale industrialised societies and small-scale foraging, farming and pastoralist communities, the sample allowed the team to examine children's helping behaviour across a wide range of social and economic contexts.
As well as academics from Plymouth, the research was a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Sapienza University of Rome, Leipzig University, the University of Portsmouth, and Duke University.
The team included
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"> Dr Patricia Kanngiesser, Associate Professor in Psychology in Plymouth.
She become involved as part of a wider range of studies looking at cooperation between young children and what influences them to put other people's interests before their own. She also helped to set up and oversee field sites in Argentina and Bolivia, collecting data from the Wichí participants in the study and facilitating data collection with the Quechua.
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