10 - Naturalistic observation of cooperation, helping, and sharing and their associations with empathy and affect

Summary

Cooperation, helping, and sharing have been the focus of many reviews of prosocial behaviors (Staub, 1978, 1979; Bryan, 1975, Rushton, 1980; Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, & Chapman, 1983). These behaviors have been studied both with the use of tasks designed to measure such interactions in laboratory settings and through direct observation in naturalistic settings. The question of whether such behaviors have been found to increase with the age and experience of the individuals studied has great significance, since cooperation, helping, and sharing are highly prized and their development has been viewed as a major goal of socialization (Rushton, 1980). However, generalizations about developmental trends based on existing data have been difficult to make. A recent extensive review of frequencies of these behaviors as related to age fails to document a unidirectional trend with age (Radke-Yarrow et al., 1983). These investigators state that there “are increases, no changes, and decreases depending on the prosocial behavior, the research methods, and the ages studied” (p. 42).

One way to proceed toward disentangling and clarifying the developmental and correlational research on the above behaviors done this far, as well as to generate new directions for future research, is to hold the method constant while doing a finer-grained analysis of the concepts and findings from present studies. This chapter examines research in naturalistic settings and, in particular, the findings as they relate to conceptualizations of prosocial behavior.