Adults are often embarrassed about asking for aid. It's an act that can make people feel emotionally unsafe. Seeking assistance can feel like you are broadcasting your incompetence.
New research suggests young children don't seek help in school, even when they need it, for the same reason. Until recently, psychologists assumed that children did not start to care about their reputation and their friends' thoughts about them until around age nine.
But our research suggests that as early as age seven, children begin to connect asking for help with looking incompetent in front of others. At some point, every child struggles in the classroom.
To learn more about how children think about reputation, we created simple stories and then asked children questions about these situations to allow kids to showcase their thinking.
Across several studies, we asked 576 children, ages four to nine, to predict the behavior of two kids in a story. One of the characters genuinely wanted to be smart, and the other merely wanted to seem smart to others. In one study, we told children that both kids did poorly on a test. The four-year-olds were equally likely to choose either of the two kids as the one who would seek help. But by age seven or eight, children thought that the kid who wanted to seem smart would be less likely to ask for assistance. And children's expectations were truly "reputational" in nature-they were specifically thinking about how the characters would act in front of others. When assistance could be sought privately (on a computer rather than in person), children thought both characters were equally likely to ask for it.
Teachers could give children more opportunities to seek assistance privately. They should also help students realize asking questions in front of others as normal, positive behavior. Parents could point out how a child's question kicked off a valuable conversation in which the entire family got to talk and learn together. Adults could praise kids for seeking assistance. These responses send a strong signal that other people value a willingness to ask for aid and that seeking help is part of a path to success.
A. Kids could be afraid to ask their parents for help.
B. Seeking help could even be taught as socially desirable.
C. In another study we told them that only one kid did poorly.
D. Such reputational barriers likely require reputation-based solutions.
E. The moment you ask for directions, after all, you reveal that you are lost.
F. But if they are afraid to ask for help because their classmates are watching, learning will suffer.
G. We then asked which of these characters would be more likely to raise their hand in front of their class to ask the teacher for help.
