= 62, 29 females, 33 males). We assessed maternal socialization goals via questionnaires, scaffolding strategies during a requested helping task, and infant prosocial behavior through both requested and spontaneous helping tasks. Scaffolding was more assertive in the Ugandan samples compared with those in the United Kingdom, where scaffolding was more deliberate. Maternal assertiveness positively predicted both spontaneous and requested helping at the individual level. However, at the group level, spontaneous helping rates were higher in Uganda than in the United Kingdom, whereas requested helping was higher in the United Kingdom than Uganda. These findings reveal important cross-cultural variation in how caregivers shape infant helping and point to a nuanced interplay between culturally specific caregiving practices and emerging prosocial behavior. Our study underscores the importance of examining both universal and context-specific pathways in the development of prosociality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Vreden et al. (Thu,) studied this question.