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Experimental and observational evidence shows that children, from around 18 months of age onwards, perform actions that can be interpreted as “helping.” For instance, they hand back fallen objects or want to participate in household activities (e.g., Rheingold, 1982; Warneken and Tomasello, 2006; Brownell, 2011; Carpendale et al., 2015). A growing amount of research is trying to understand the psychological basis behind this behavior (for reviews see Paulus, 2014; Brownell, 2016; see also Warneken, 2015, for an evolutionary perspective). For example, is young children’s “helping” due to an interest in the wellbeing of others? Or does it reflect a motivation to interact with other people and to be involved in their actions? In order to understand what drives children’s helping, a number of recent studies have used pupil dilation as a measure of children’s arousal (Hepach et al., 2012, 2016a,b), concluding that children’s motivation to help is intrinsically altruistic. This opinion piece aims at re-examining those findings, suggesting that they are also compatible with alternative explanations. In the studies discussed here, pupil diameter is measured by means of an eye tracker. Changes in pupil diameter reflect the contraction or dilation of the sphincter and the dilator muscles, innervated (respectively) by the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. Changes in pupil dilation (when light conditions are kept constant) thus reflect changes in autonomic arousal (Beatty and Lucero-Wagoner, 2000). The advantage of using pupillometry is that it provides information which cannot be accessed with behavioral measures and a quantitative measure of the psychological processes underlying a certain behavior (Hepach and Westermann, 2016). One drawback of pupil dilation is that it is an unspecific measure of autonomic activation, which might result from a variety of cognitive and emotional processes (Beatty and Lucero-Wagoner, 2000; Sirois and Brisson, 2014). This ambiguity does not (without tight control conditions) allow to infer which psychological process is causing the arousal. Despite this fact, pupil dilation assessments are potentially useful in developmental research: They give a quantitative measure of the psychological processes related to a certain event which is not influenced by shyness or verbal fluency because children are not required to provide an overt response (Hepach and Westermann, 2016). Hepach et al. (2012, 2016a,b) for the first time applied this measure in the context of instrumental helping to assess children’s autonomic arousal when perceiving a situation in which someone displays a need for help.

Intrinsic Altruism or Social Motivation—What Does Pupil Dilation Tell Us about Children's Helping Behavior?