Effects of the Presence of Children on Adults' Helping Behavior and Compliance: Two Field Studies

Two field studies investigated complementary aspects of the notion that the presence of children affects adults' helping behavior. In the first, 33 lone women (19 accompanied, 14 unaccompanied by a child), 28 pairs of women (14 with, 14 without a child), and 30 mixed-sex couples (15 with, 15 without a child) encountered an "injured" confederate in parks and parking lots of shopping centers. The main results suggested that it may be the task of fathers to model altruism for children in this situation. In the second study, an adult woman, accompanied or unaccompanied by a child, or a lone child, asked a total of 84 women in their suburban homes to sign a petition which was either "appropriate" or "inappropriate" for children. While an interaction between the age-of-requester and appropriateness-of-petition factors was predicted, only the overall difference between petitions was significant (p < .01). Implications of these results were discussed.