Bystander Effect Of Helping Behavior Of Young Children And Its Related Factors

Children helping behaviour is an important behaviour in the pro-social behaviour, but the study of children helping behaviour is very few. We can find a lot of the studies about the children pro-social behaviour, in these studies we can see helping, sharing and donating behaviour study and so on. Put them together, it can be called the pro-social behaviour. The study of the helping behaviour often focuses on the effect factors such as the characteristics of those who help others, the characteristics of the aided people, the social cultural background and the situational characteristic. This study is focus on the bystander effect of children helping behavior in the non-emergent situations and other effects on the children helping behaviour.This study chooses 360 children from two kindergartens in Shanghai. The study investigates the helping behaviour of children by the experimental method, the questionnaire method and the interview survey. One purpose of the present research was to investigate the effects of variation in the number of witnesses present on children helping people in distress. Another purpose of this research is to investigate changes with age in children help people in distress, and investigate weather the gender differences exist in the helping behaviour of children. The third purpose was to investigate the internal relation between children social skills, children temperament and children helping behavior through a simple interview, "Social Skills Assessment System (Teacher Edition)" questionnaire and "Children's Temperament Scale (Parent Edition)" questionnaire in order to provide a new way to train the helping behaviour of children.Finally we reach the conclusions as follows:(1) There is a bystander effect on children helping people in distress in non-emergent situations. A child who faces the people in distress is more eager to help others than children in pairs.(2) Children helping behaviour increase with age,but there is not gender difference. But different situations have different results. In the single group situations, there is neither age differences nor gender differences in helping behaviour; there is only the age differences in the pairs situations; in boy-boy group situations and girl-girl group situations, age differences appear significant, especially in girl-girl group situations, there is very significant age differences in helping behaviour of young children; in boy-girl group situations, children helping behavior appears significant gender differences, but without age differences.(3) The relationship between children temperament and children helping behaviour varies with different situations. Only in girl-girl group situations, there is a negative correlation between helping behaviour, approach-withdrawal and threshold of responsiveness of temperament. The higher scores in Approach-withdrawal, the more withdrawal in social interaction and the possibility of helping behavior is lower; the higher scores in the threshold of responsiveness, indicating the lower response threshold is, the more sensitive children are, the possibility of helping behavior is also lower.(4) The relationship between children helping behaviour and the peer ability in social skills of children is a positive correlation. But the relationship of helping behaviour and social skills varies according to the different situations. In the single group situations, the relationship between children helping behaviour and peer ability is a positive correlation. In pairs situations, the children helping behaviour and children self-control is a significant negative correlation, the higher in self-control ability of the children, the lower helping behaviours possibility is. In boy-boy group situations, there is a positive relationship between children helping behaviour, the peer ability and the learning adaptive companion. The higher the peer ability or ability to learn is, the more helpful behavior exists; in boy-girl group situations, there is a significant negative relation between children helping behavior and social skills in young children self-control; while in the girl-girl group situations there isn't any correlation between helping behaviour and social skills.