Recipient identifiability increases prosocial behavior in young children.

Research in adults has established that identifying an individual (e.g., by name or a photograph) increases adults' prosocial behavior toward that individual. However, little is known about the developmental emergence of this "identifiable victim effect." We conducted a preregistered study to assess the effects of identifiability on young children's prosocial behavior. Children aged 3.5 to 6.5 years were given five stickers that they could distribute between themselves and another child, who was either identified by name or unidentified. Across ages, children were more likely to share-and shared more stickers-with the identified recipient than with the unidentified recipient. These results indicate that recipient identifiability promotes prosocial behavior from remarkably early in development.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

• Publication date

  2022-07-09

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105500PMID 35820246
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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