Realistic stories are better for promoting young children's prosocial behavior

 

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart

important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain

anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropo-

morphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters,

and thus are more inclined to act according to the moral lessons of the stories. 

 

This study experimentally tested this belief by reading preschoolers a sharing story with

either human characters or anthropomorphized animal characters. Reading the human

story significantly increased preschoolers’ altruistic giving but reading the anthropo-

morphic story or a control story decreased it. Thus, contrary to the common belief,

realistic stories, not anthropomorphic ones, are better for promoting young children's
prosocial behavior.