Children less likely to come to the rescue when others are available

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/afps-cll032415.php

Public Release: 24-Mar-2015
Association for Psychological Science

Children as young as 5 years old are less likely to help a person in need when other children are present and available to help, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"The children in our study helped at very high levels only when responsibility was clearly attributable to them," explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Maria Plötner of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "These findings suggest that children at this age take responsibility into account when deciding whether to help."

The research indicates that, just like adults, children show the "bystander effect," which is most likely driven by a diffusion of responsibility when multiple bystanders are available to help someone in need.

Previous research has shown that children are generally very helpful, but few studies had specifically looked at whether the presence of others affects this helping behavior.

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