Although attributions about others’ sad emotions have been shown to be positively related to helping behavior, there have been considerable inconsistencies in the fi ndings. This study was designed to investigate the relations of affective attributions, affective reconciliations, and cognitive perspective-taking measures to prosocial behavior. Eightynine preschool through second grade children ...

Limited dispersal may favor the evolution of helping behaviors between relatives as it increases their relatedness, and it may inhibit such evolution as it increases local competition between these relatives. Here, we explore one way out of this dilemma: if the helping behavior allows groups to expand in size, then the kin-competition pressure opposing its evolution can be greatly reduced. We e...

Several hypotheses aim to explain the evolution of helping behavior, but conclusive experimental support for evaluating the relative importance of individual hypotheses is still larking We report on two field experiments* conducted to test the "territory inheritance" and "pay-to-stay" hypotheses in the cooperatively breeding cichlid fish Neolamprologus pulcher. The territory inheritance hypothe...

Relations between parental socialization and infants' prosocial behavior were investigated in sixty three 18- and 30-month old children. Parents' socialization techniques (e.g., directives, negotiation, reasoning) differed for the two age groups, as did relations between socialization and different forms of emerging prosocial behavior (helping; sharing).

Inclusive fitness benefits have been suggested as the selective force behind the evolution of cooperative breeding. Assessing the benefits accrued to individual males and females is crucial to understanding the sex-specific helping behavior observed in many cooperatively breeding species. We investigated the fitness consequences of male and female helping behavior in the Seychelles warbler (Acr...

The study of culturally inherited traits has led to the suggestion that the evolution of helping behaviors is more likely with cultural transmission than without. Here we evaluate this idea through a comparative analysis of selection on helping under both genetic and cultural inheritance. We develop two simple models for the evolution of helping through cultural group selection: one in which se...