'Paternalistic helping': Children prioritize others' ultimate intentions and best interests over their current desires

Giving others what they want is not always the best way to help them. Responding to another person's request helpfully and cooperatively requires considering both their immediate goals as well as their ultimate intentions and welfare. Previous work suggests that children help others by fulfilling their immediate goals from a young age, expect third parties to do the same, and prefer individuals who helpfully fulfill goals over those who hinder them. This dissertation presents four sets of experiments in which children are faced with a situation where an individual's immediate goals conflict with the individual's ultimate intentions or best interests. Results suggest that children recognize that underlying intentions should be prioritized when responding to a request (Chapter 2), prioritize intentions even when they are at odds with what the requester is explicitly asking for (Chapter 3), deny an individual's wishes when fulfilling them might result in a negative outcome for the individual (Chapter 4), and sometimes even deny others' wishes when doing so would provide them with a better outcome later on (Chapter 5). Overall this work suggests that preschool children do not only help by fulfilling others' goals and requests; they recognize that immediate goal satisfaction is only a part of what goals into promoting others' ultimate welfare.