Children from across the world consistently help their peers, but in different ways

Researchers from the University of Plymouth are part of an international team that explored child cooperation across different cultures

Children from across the world consistently help their peers, but in different ways

Researchers from the University of Plymouth are part of an international team that explored child cooperation across different cultures

Patricia Kanngiesser

2 October 2026

A new study by an international research team, including experts in child psychology at the University of Plymouth, has provided the first systematic, cross-cultural comparison of how children help their peers.

Previous research has mainly focused on how children help adults, often within their own families, but peer interactions play an equally important, yet far less studied, role in children's social lives across many cultures.

To gauge this, researchers conducted a study with 336 children aged four to nine from six different cultural groups: Germans, Wichí (Argentina), ≠Akhoe Hai||om (Namibia), Samburu and Kikuyu (Kenya) and Quechua (Bolivia).

Spanning large-scale industrialised societies and small-scale foraging, farming and pastoralist communities, the sample allowed the team to examine children's helping behaviour across a wide range of social and economic contexts.

As well as academics from Plymouth, the research was a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Sapienza University of Rome, Leipzig University, the University of Portsmouth, and Duke University.

The team included Dr Patricia Kanngiesser, Associate Professor in Psychology in Plymouth.

She become involved as part of a wider range of studies looking at cooperation between young children and what influences them to put other people’s interests before their own. She also helped to set up and oversee field sites in Argentina and Bolivia, collecting data from the Wichí participants in the study and facilitating data collection with the Quechua.

Helping each other is such a fundamental aspect of human communities.

What this study adds to our existing knowledge is that despite growing up in very different environments, children helped each other in similar ways and adapted to their partner’s need. We know a lot about how children in the UK grow up, but we still don’t know enough about children’s development in other parts of the world. If we want to understand human development we need to study it globally, but this type of research is only possible as a team effort and is still exceedingly rare.

Dr Patricia Kanngiesser
Associate Professor in Psychology

She says the findings support her belief that children learn a lot from each other, and that encouraging greater play time with peers is important for them to try things out and develop relationships with others.

A simple game reveals a universal instinct

To capture children's spontaneous helping behaviour, the researchers designed a playful experimental setup that would feel natural across all settings. Pairs of children of the same age took turns playing a marble game. One child would observe the other encountering difficulties, such as a box that would not open or a container that spilled its marbles onto the floor. Having already learned how to solve both problems, the observing child could choose to help by explaining the solution, solving the problem hands-on, or doing both at once.

This task showed us in a very direct and comparable way how children choose to help their peers when given the chance. What stood out immediately was how similar children's responses were, regardless of where they grew up.

Dr Henriette Zeidler
Researcher at Sapienza University in Rome and the study's lead author

A new study by an international research team, including experts in child psychology at the University of Plymouth, has provided the first systematic, cross-cultural comparison of how children help their peers

Henriette Zeidler

Helping that fits the need

Across all six cultures, children consistently helped their partners, doing so more often when help was genuinely necessary. For example, they were more likely to help a peer who was struggling to open a box than a peer who was picking up scattered marbles, a task that could easily be done alone. This sensitivity to their partner's actual needs became even more pronounced with age. While younger children helped in both situations at similar rates, older children increasingly reserved their assistance for moments when it clearly made a difference.

The way in which children helped also changed over time. Younger children mostly relied on providing practical assistance, doing the task for their peer, while older children increasingly offered information, explaining how a problem could be solved rather than solving it themselves.

Cultural fine-tuning within a shared pattern

Despite this overall consistency, the study revealed subtle yet reliable cultural differences in helping styles. German children were far more likely than those in any other group to provide both types of help simultaneously, solving the problem while explaining it. Kikuyu children, on the other hand, were somewhat less inclined to provide practical assistance than children in other cultures.

These patterns mirror the everyday interactions that children are familiar with. In many rural, subsistence-based communities, children learn largely by observing and helping out, with little verbal explanation involved. In Germany and similar places, however, parents tend to combine hands-on demonstrations with detailed verbal instructions, and children seem to apply the same approach when helping their peers.

Dr Henriette Zeidler

Importantly, the researchers found no meaningful differences in helping behaviour between boys and girls, and the cultural differences that did emerge were modest in scale. None of the six populations stood out as clearly different from the overall cross-cultural pattern.

A shared foundation, locally expressed

Combining a carefully standardised experimental task with a uniquely diverse cross-cultural sample offers rare insight into how deeply rooted yet flexible children's helping behaviour really is.

Helping is one of the clearest expressions of our species' capacity for cooperation. Our data show that this capacity reliably emerges in children everywhere, but it is fine-tuned by the specific social world in which each child grows up. Children don't just learn whether to help; they also learn how to help in ways that make sense within their own community.

Professor Daniel Haun
Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

The full study – Zeidler et al: Children from six cultures reliably help their peers - but in different ways – is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2515233123.