Others’ requests may dampen the desire to do good – The role of individual agency in middle childhood

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Joscha Kärtner
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 492770520

From early in development, children are intrinsically motivated to tend to others’ needs and they happily follow others’ requests and encouragements. The core assumption and point of departure of this project proposal is that, across middle childhood, children in more independent cultures develop from a relational sense of agency, in which others’ expectations and duties are considered as consonant with agentic motivation, to a more individual sense of agency, in which others’ expectations are considered as opposing agency. As a consequence, children with a more individual sense of agency increasingly come to perceive behavior as agentic only if it is chosen with free will and independent of any external forces. Hence, others’ expectations take on a negative, coercive quality that infringe feelings of agency, and, in turn, dampen the desire to do good and the satisfaction that results from it. Along these lines, the overarching objectives of the proposed project are, first, to document the emergence of individual and cross-cultural differences in children’s individual sense of agency across middle childhood (Aim 1), and, second, to test the consequences that these differences have for the motivation associated with spontaneous and requested prosocial behavior between 6 and 11 years of age (Aim 2). To test these two assumptions, the proposed project consists of a series of four studies that aim at providing converging evidence across different cultures (Münster, Germany, Kyoto, Japan, and Otavalo, Ecuador) and methodological approaches. In Studies 1 and 2, the development of interindividual (Study 1) and cross-cultural (Study 2) similarities and differences in children’s development of individual agency will be assessed and the hypothesized implications of others’ requests on prosocial motivation will be tested based on children’s perception of a prosocial agent’s desire and satisfaction associated with spontaneous vs. requested helping and sharing in vignette-based paradigms. Focusing on the second half of middle childhood (i.e., 9 to 11 years), when differences in children’s sense of agency have emerged, the proposed project aims at providing convergent evidence for the hypothesized interplay between children’s individual sense of agency, others’ requests and prosocial motivation (Aim 2) by, first, providing evidence following a priming approach, in which children’s sense of agency will be experimentally manipulated (Study 3). Furthermore, a behavior-based study (Study 4) will explicitly test the assumption underlying previous work, namely that children’s sense of individual agency does not only affect children’s perceptions of others in vignette-based paradigms (Studies 1 to 3), but also their own experience and behavior. In concert, these four studies have the potential to provide conclusive evidence concerning the role that children’s sense of agency plays for the effect of others’ expectations on prosocial motivation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Ecuador, Japan
• Cooperation Partners: Shoji Itakura; Dr. Jorge Mantilla; Dr. Frank Mila