幼儿对受助者的能力评价及任务难度感知的作用

Children’s Evaluations of the Help Recipient’s Competence:The Effect of Perceived Difficulty of Tasks

受助者接受他人的帮助可能向旁观者发出某种信号——受助者无法完成目标任务,即受助者是无能的。本研究采用行为实验法考察3~5岁幼儿对受助者的能力评价,并探究任务难度的感知能否提高幼儿对受助者的能力评价。结果表明:4岁是幼儿对受助者能力消极评价的年龄转折点。4岁后,幼儿认为受助者能力不如未受助者,即消极评价受助者能力;任务难度感知可以提高4~5岁幼儿对受助者的能力评价。本研究结果有助于理解幼儿如何评价受助者的能力以及如何减少接受帮助带给受助者能力的消极评价。

Receiving help may send some kind of signals to the bystanders:The group members who have received help are incompetent,because they are unable to complete the target task by themselves.In this study,the behavioral experiment method was mainly adopted to examine the competence evaluations of the group that received help by children aged 3 to 5.Besides,whether the children's perception of the task's difficulty could improve the children's competence evaluations of the group that received help was investigated.In order to explore whether there are negative evaluations about the competence of groups that received help in different age groups(n=93).After watching the situational video,each child needed to score the competence of those who received help and those who did not.Apart from that,the generalized estimating equations(GEE)was used to analyze the results.It showed that the main effect of the group being evaluated was very significant,with B=1.581,SE=0.119,Wald’s χ^(2)(1)=164.769,p<0.001.The competence score of the group that received help was significantly lower than that of the group that didn’t receive help,with p<.001.The main effect of age group was significant,with B=0.452,SE=0.143,Wald’s χ^(2)(2)=8.358,p<.05.The competence scores of 4-year-old children and 5-year-old children were significantly lower than those of 3-year-old children,with ps<.05.However,there was no significant difference between the competence scores of the 4-year-old and 5-year-old children,with p>0.05.In order to further investigate whether the perception of task’s difficulty can improve children’s competence scores of 4-year-old and 5-year-old children(n=120).In Experiment 2,each participant first needed to operate the puzzle and evaluated the difficulty of the puzzle task.Then,they watched the video to score the competence of the group that received help and the group that didn’t.It was found that the main effect of the group being evaluated was extremely significant,with B=1.150,SE=.070,Wald’s χ^(2)(1)=89.570,p<0.001.The competence score of the group that received help was significantly lower than the group that didn’t receive help,with p<.001.At the same time,the main effect of the perception of task’s difficulty was extremely significant,with B=.117,SE=.041,Wald’s χ^(2)(1)=1682.659,p<0.001.Under the condition of the perception of low task’s difficulty,children’s competence evaluations of the evaluated group were significantly lower than that of the perception of medium task’s difficulty,with p<.05.Under the condition of the perception of medium task’s difficulty,children’s competence evaluations of the evaluated group were significantly lower than that of the perception of high task’s difficulty,with p<.001.Nonetheless,the main effect of age group was not significant,with B=0.017,SE=0.285,Wald’s χ^(2)(1)=0.810,p>.05.The interaction between the evaluated group and the perception of task’s difficulty was extremely significant,with B=0.467,SE=.073,Wald’s χ^(2)(2)=42.983,p<0.001.After further simple effect analysis,it was observed that under the three perception conditions of task’s difficulty,children’s competence scores of the group that received help were significantly lower than the group that didn’t receive help,with ps<.001.The results showed that:(1)4 years old is the age turning point for children to evaluate the competence of those who received help,and receiving help exerts a negative impact on the evaluations of recipients’competence;(2)Children's perception of the difficulty of the task could reduce this negative impact.In short,the results of this study are helpful to understand how young children evaluate the competence of those who received help and how to reduce the negative impact of receiving help.