Children show stronger cooperative behavior in experimental settings as they get older, but little is known about how the environment of a child shapes this development. In adults, prosocial behavior toward strangers is markedly decreased in low socio-economic status (SES) neighborhoods, suggesting that environmental harshness has a negative impact on some prosocial behaviors. Similar results h...

The present study investigated the characteristics of children who remain consistently peer victimized in comparison to those who transition out of victimization status. The relationships between victimization and the victim’s level of overt aggression, relational aggression, impulsivity, and prosocial behaviors were examined from one year to the next. At Time 1, 1589 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade ch...

Bonobos are the only ape species, other than humans, that have demonstrated prosocial behaviors toward groupmates and strangers. However, bonobos have not been tested in the most frequently used test of prosociality in animals. The current study tested the other-regarding preferences of bonobos in two experiments using the prosocial choice task. In the first experiment subjects preferred a food...

People can form opinions of other individuals based on information about their good or bad behavior. The present study investigated whether this affective learning might depend on memory links formed between initially neutral people and valenced information. First, participants viewed neutral faces paired with sentences describing prosocial or antisocial behaviors. Second, memory suppression ma...

Formal and informal institutions, such as laws and social norms, are pervasive in daily life. They help maintain cooperation by coordinating and constraining individuals’ behaviors. However, our understanding of the comparative benefits and the endogenous emergence of institutions remains limited. Here, we study the emergence and performance of sanctioning institutions in a public goods context...

This study examined why some preschool-age children exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) showed deleterious outcomes and others appeared more resilient. Resilience, conceptualized as strengths in emotion regulation and prosocial skills, was evaluated using the Social Competence Scale developed by the Conduct Problem Prevention Research Group. The sample consisted of 56 mothers and their 4...

This study uses survey data to test the correlation between empathic concern and 14 different prosocial behaviors, including informal help to individuals and formal helping through institutions. Statistically significant correlations were found for 10 behaviors, but substantively meaningful correlations were only found for three, all of which were spontaneous, informal helping behaviors, where ...