Psychology Research and Behavior Management (Aug 2021)
The Effects of Prosocial Cartoon Examples on Children’s Donating Behavior
Abstract
Qian Zhang,1 ZheMin Duan,1 Dan Xiang,1 Yue Yu,1 JingJin Tian2 1Center for Studies of Education and Psychology of Minorities in Southwest Area & Faculty of Education, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 2Dawn Innovation Kindergarten, Chongqing, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Qian ZhangDivision of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail [email protected]: In this study, we examined whether prosocial cartoons could inspire children to donate toys to others immediately upon exposure.Participants and Methods: Cartoons were rated as prosocial or control via 80 adults. One hundred and fifty-six children participated in the study (Mage = 5.29, SD = 0.79). Children in the experimental group were exposed to cartoons in which the main character had a large number of donating behaviors, while children in the control group watched cartoons without donating behaviors (randomized controlled study). They watched these cartoons for 4 consecutive days. Afterwards, children’s donating behaviors toward their peers were assessed in the Toy Donation Task (TDT). An analytic method of 2 (cartoon: prosocial vs control) × 2 (gender: male vs female) × 3 (age: 4 vs 5 vs 6) analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to make result analyses.Results: The empirical results indicated that watching cartoons specifically depicting charitable donations (and not cartoons with other prosocial content) increased donations for charitable causes, whilst watching the control cartoons (cartoons without prosocial content) which did not depict characters acting in an antisocial way did not increase donating behavior. Specifically, 5-year-old female children reported more donating behavior than 6-year-old female children and 4-year-old female children, whilst no significant age effects were found among male children. Here, 4– 6-year-old female children and 4– 5-year-old male children in the prosocial cartoon condition reported more donating behavior than those in the control cartoon condition.Conclusion: These findings indicated an accumulating positive effect of watching cartoons with donating content on children’s donating behavior, especially for 4– 6-year-old female children and 4– 5-year-old male children.Keywords: prosocial cartoons, donating behavior, toy donation task, children
