Effects of Mental Representations of Children on Prosocial Motivation, 2017-2021

This research project examines adult mental representations of children and their implications for prosocial motivation in adults. The original proposal contained six experiments testing when and how the salience of children elicits prosocial motivation in adults. As the project evolved, and later as the Covid-19 pandemic emerged, we included design alterations to better address some of the key research questions, creating a greater number of studies that could programmatically replicate key findings and address follow-up questions that the findings raised. By its completion, our project included three broad collections of studies. The largest comprising 19 studies examined effects of child salience on prosocial motivation, the mechanisms underpinning this effect, and generalizability across outcomes and contexts. Following the original proposal, 10 of these studies were experiments that used different means to make children salient (e.g., descriptions, videos) on prosocial motivation. Across these studies, we found support for our hypothesis that the salience of children increases pro-social motivation and behaviour in adults. An additional 4 studies examined the effects of making children salient in appeals to help the environment, 4 examined the effects of child salience on the mental accessibility of prosocial values and attitudes, and one examined the effects of child salience on empathy. A second set of 14 studies developed and refined a set of scales measuring attitudes toward children (including adolescents in the early studies) and examined associations between two novel dimensions of these attitudes (affection and stress) and a range of measures assessing personality dimensions and prosocial and punitive beliefs regarding children. These studies included explorations of the role of attitudes toward children in prejudice, using face perception designs. A third set of 4 studies began to refine and examine our set of scales measuring attitudes toward teenagers and examined associations between three novel dimensions of these attitudes (ambivalence, negativity, positivity) and measures assessing personality dimensions and beliefs regarding adolescents and young people (e.g., compliance with Covid restrictions)