Social reasoning in action : social-cognitive mechanisms supporting prosocial decisions in early childhood

Each human being has their own thoughts, desires, and physical capabilities, which enables productive cooperation and collaboration integral to our species' success. Yet, these differences also pose inferential challenges for figuring out how best to help others. What supports our ability to coordinate our individual differences to help and cooperate with one another effectively? An important insight that guides the research presented in this dissertation is that helping involves more than the desire or motivation to help; it involves the ability to problem-solve on others' behalf and perform appropriate causal interventions tailored to others' goals, knowledge, and physical capabilities. In this dissertation, I present an opinion piece and three sets of studies that demonstrate and interrogate how children figure out how to help others. I argue that intuitive theories -- naïve understandings about how the world works and how other people act -- are at the foundation of how children make prosocial decisions and take action appropriately given the context. In Chapter 2, I present an opinion piece on how successful helping behavior not only requires an understanding of others' goals (goal-inference), but also an understanding \emph{how} to help (means-inference) and discuss how ambiguity in both of these inferences can shed light on the variability in children's helping across different studies and domains (i.e., instrumental action, informing, comforting, sharing). In Chapter 3, toddlers use their causal knowledge to figure out why someone failed and how they should respond; in Chapter 4, 3-year-olds use others' physical constraints to infer what goals others' failed to achieve and thus need help accomplishing; and in Chapter 5, 5- to 7-year-olds reason about others' expected costs and rewards to anticipate what goals others' might like but struggle to achieve in order to make utility-maximizing decisions about what to teach and what to let learners discover. We formalize the teaching decision using a computational model, providing further insight into the details of the cognitive mechanisms that support children's early teaching behavior. Children are not just observers of their social world but are active participants in it. By studying children's ability to deploy and use their social reasoning in action, we can gain insights on how early sensitivities may or may not manifest in children's own social behavior, raising questions about the robustness and flexibility of these early representations but also what additional skills are needed to translate knowledge into action. Intervention is a highly sophisticated and intelligent behavior. An agent equipped with an intuitive causal theory of the world uses that theory to take effective action in the world for themselves and others. Incredibly powerful artificial intelligence systems can interpret and predict events but AI struggles to make advances in designing robots that can intervene in the world as flexibly and adaptively as a human child. Early-emerging capacities to reason about other minds (i.e., what others know or want) and the utility of their goal-directed actions (i.e., what goals are rewarding for others to achieve and costly to achieve on their own) provide the foundations for large-scale cooperation and curation of cultural knowledge across generations that is characteristic of human societies

Keywords: Psychology.
Advisor: Gweon Hyowon
Frank Michael C. (Professor of human biology) 
Markman Ellen M.