Toddlers' Helping, Sharing, and Empathic Distress: Does the Race of the Target Matter?

Some work demonstrates toddlers show preferences in targets of their prosocial behavior, and a number of theorists have argued that young children become increasingly likely to direct their prosocial behavior to ingroup over outgroup targets with development. The goal of this study was to examine whether toddlers' early helping, sharing, and empathic distress were influenced by the race of the target person. Ninety-four White European American 18-month-old (17-19 months, M = 18.25, SD = .43; 55.1% male) and 24-month-old (23-25 months; M = 23.67, SD = .57; 53.1% male) toddlers took part in a series of tasks designed to assess children's instrumental helping, sharing, and empathic distress. These toddlers came from well-educated families (86.4% of mothers had a college degree and 73.8% of their partners had a college degree or more). In the study, the race of the needy target was manipulated, so that half of the children had the opportunity to respond prosocially to a White target and half had the opportunity to be prosocial to a Black target. The race of the needy experimenter influenced children's instrumental helping and emotional arousal in a feigned injury task, but did not influence their sharing behavior. Contrary to our hypothesis, though, the older toddlers expressed more empathic distress and arousal to the Black experimenter's feigned injury than to a White experimenter's feigned injury. Implications for theory and research aimed at understanding discriminatory prosocial behaviors between young children are discussed.