Others’ requests may dampen the desire to do good: The effect of requests on children’s prosocial motivation across five cultures.

There exists cultural variation in how people react to prosocial obligations, but we still know little about when these differences emerge in development and how they can be explained. We investigated this in a study with 6- to 11-year-old children (N = 686) in five cultural contexts. Children listened to scenarios about spontaneous and requested (within-subjects) helping and sharing. They rated requested scenarios as less desirable and less satisfying, but there was significant cross-cultural variation in the magnitude of this effect, which was mostly stable with age. We also measured children's sense of individual agency and internalization of prosocial norms as potential explanations. While internalization moderated the effect of requests in helping scenarios at the individual level, neither agency nor norm internalization explained cross-cultural variation in children's judgments of requests. Overall, our findings underline the importance of self-determination for motivation and offer insights into cross-cultural similarities and differences in prosocial motivation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).