What drives toddlers’ helping behavior? And do toddlers’ helping motivations change across time? In line with Dahl and Paulus (2019), we propose that initially, toddlers start helping in ongoing chores driven by their interest in social interactions, and, later on, their helping becomes more concern based, or based on a sense of responsibility. To test this assumption, we used a longitudinal approach to examine the role that social interaction plays in toddlers’ motivation to help as they grow older. As such, we investigated whether a disruption to an experimenter during a shared chore task affected toddlers’ motivations to continue helping at the ages of 18, 21 and 24 months. Results showed that toddlers at 18 months were less likely to continue helping when the experimenter was disrupted from the shared task, in comparison to toddlers at 21 and at 24 months. These findings support the idea that toddlers develop from socially based participators into more prosocially based contributors.

是什么推动了幼儿的帮助行为？幼儿的帮助动机是否会随着时间而改变？与 Dahl 和 Paulus（2019 年）一致，我们建议最初，幼儿在他们对社交互动的兴趣的驱动下开始帮助正在进行的家务活，后来，他们的帮助变得更多基于关注或基于责任感。为了检验这一假设，我们使用纵向方法来检验社交互动在幼儿长大后提供帮助的动机中所起的作用。因此，我们调查了在共同的家务任务中干扰实验者是否会影响 18、21 和 24 个月大的幼儿继续提供帮助的动机。结果表明，当实验者从共同任务中被打断时，18 个月大的幼儿不太可能继续提供帮助，与 21 个月和 24 个月的幼儿相比。这些发现支持这样一种观点，即幼儿从基于社会的参与者发展成为更基于社会的贡献者。