Social expectations influence perceived prosocial motivation in 6- to 11-year-old German children

In three studies, we examined whether maternal requests affect 6- to 11-year-old German children’s perception of a prosocial agent’s duty, desire and satisfaction to act prosocially. Study 1 (N = 45) was conducted in a face-to-face setting with an experimenter and included four vignettes with protagonists that helped in the household in either a spontaneous or a requested condition. In the requested scenarios, children perceived the protagonist to feel more duty and less desire to help but not more satisfaction than in the spontaneous scenarios. In Study 2 (N = 105), children rated two sharing and two helping scenarios in the same conditions in an unmoderated online setting. While we found no statistical support for an effect on perceived duty, children attributed less desire and satisfaction to protagonists that helped and shared in the requested scenarios. In Study 3, we tested children in an unmoderated setting (n = 125) and a video-call setting (n = 93). In both settings, adding a request increased duty to help and decreased desire to share and help. We found no statistical support for an effect on duty to share in the video-call setting. Although the effects were descriptively bigger in the video-call setting, only the effects on desire and satisfaction to share were significantly stronger. Across the three studies we investigated if the effect of the manipulation was moderated by children’s age, individual agency and norm internalization, but only found partial support for the effect of age (Study 2) and internalization (Study 3).