Precocious Prosociality: Why Do Young Children Help?

Human prosociality is marked by the versatility with which we help across various contexts. New research highlights that this capacity emerges early in human ontogeny. In this article, I review evidence showing that young children's helping is both flexible and robust, based upon inferential social-cognitive capacities and prosocial motivations. Then I discuss the possible evolutionary function of helping skills as an early-emerging trait. I use evolutionary theory and anthropological evidence to support the hypothesis that children's helping affects adult subsistence in traditional societies and argue that evolution thus might have favored an early developmental onset of these behaviors.