Organizations often put children front and center in campaigns to elicit interest and support for prosocial causes. Such initiatives raise a key theoretical and applied question that has yet to be addressed directly: Does the salience of children increase prosocial motivation and behavior in adults? We present findings aggregated across eight experiments involving 2,054 adult participants: Prosocial values became more important after completing tasks that made children salient compared to tasks that made adults (or a mundane event) salient or compared to a no-task baseline. An additional field study showed that adults were more likely to donate money to a child-unrelated cause when children were more salient on a shopping street. The findings suggest broad, reliable interconnections between human mental representations of children and prosocial motives, as the child salience effect was not moderated by participants’ gender, age, attitudes, or contact with children.

组织经常将儿童放在运动的前列和中心位置，以引起对亲社会事业的兴趣和支持。这些举措提出了一个尚待直接解决的关键理论和应用问题：儿童的显着性会增加成年人的亲社会动机和行为吗？我们提出的结果涉及8个实验，涉及2,054名成人参与者：与使成年人（或世俗事件）显着或与无任务基线相比，完成使儿童显着的任务后，亲社会价值变得更加重要。另一项现场研究表明，当孩子在购物街上越显眼时，成年人更有可能将捐款捐赠给与孩子无关的事业。研究结果表明，