Undergraduate Research Conference Proceedings

From an early age, children evaluate others’ actions to determine who is helpful, oftenusing cues like effort, cost, and intention to inform dispositional inferences. While prior research has typically relied on direct comparisons of high- and low-cost helping behaviors, real-world judgments often occur in the absence of such contrasts. This study investigates whether children infer greater helpfulness from a single act of high-cost helping, even without explicit comparison. Using a between-subjects design, we presented 3- to 12-year-old children (N = 106)with a vignette in which an agent helps another character retrieve a toy, either by incurring a high cost (climbing to the top shelf) or a low cost (grabbing it from a lower shelf). Children evaluated the helper’s dispositional helpfulness and predicted their likelihood of helping in new situations, including costlier or cross-domain contexts. Because nearly all children judged the helper as maximally helpful, there were no significant differences in explicit assessments of helpfulness based on cost condition. Children predicted the agent to help in all future scenarios, regardless of the cost that the agent initially incurred. However, responses to counterfactual inference questions revealed differences between older and younger children, suggesting that social reasoning about counterfactual scenarios or perceived competence of others may become more sophisticated with age.