Summary: A new study finds that storybooks with human characters teach moral lessons more effectively to young children than stories featuring anthropomorphized animals.
Source: University of Toronto
Children’s storybooks that use human characters — rather than animal characters that look and act like people — are more effective at teaching young children social lessons such as honesty and sharing, according to research from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto.
Researchers examined how 4- to 6-year-old children responded after hearing a short story about sharing. The study compared three versions of the story: one with human characters, one with anthropomorphized animals (animals that speak and wear clothes), and an unrelated control story about seeds. The goal was to measure whether the type of character influences whether children apply the story’s moral in their own behavior.
The results were clear: preschoolers who heard the story with human characters increased their altruistic sharing afterwards, while children who heard the same narrative told with anthropomorphic animal characters shared less. Children who heard the unrelated seeds story likewise did not increase sharing.
“Many people assume that children naturally relate to animal characters and therefore learn from them as well as from human characters,” says Patricia Ganea, associate professor of early cognitive development at OISE and a lead author on the study. “Our data indicate that when the aim is to promote real-world social behaviors, stories with human characters are more likely to encourage children to act on the lesson.”
The study explored why anthropomorphic animals may be less effective. When asked to describe or classify pictures, most children did not attribute human traits to the animal characters in the anthropomorphic story. Those few children who did see the animals as humanlike were more likely to increase sharing after the animal story. This suggests that if children view the story characters as dissimilar from themselves, they are less inclined to transfer the lesson to their own behavior.
Graduate student Nicole Larsen, who collaborated on the research as part of her master’s work, emphasizes the active role caregivers can play: “Parents can help children transfer lessons from books to everyday life by asking children to explain parts of the story and by pointing out similarities between the story’s events and the child’s own experiences.”
Study procedure: children were first given an opportunity to share some of their ten stickers with another child to establish a baseline. They were then read one of the three books described above. After the reading, children were given a second opportunity to share new stickers. The primary outcome was the change in the number of stickers shared before versus after reading. Researchers also asked children to sort pictures depicting humans, anthropomorphic animals, and realistic animals according to whether they showed human-like or animal-like traits, to gauge how children perceived the characters.
To test whether children simply preferred one kind of story over another, the researchers also offered choices between the human and animal books. Preferences for book type did not predict whether children would behave more prosocially after the reading.
Key findings
- Children shared more after hearing the story with human characters and shared less after hearing the animal-character version or the unrelated control story.
- Among children who heard the animal-character story, those who attributed human characteristics to the animals were more likely to increase sharing.
- Overall, children did not show a strong preference for human-versus-animal books, indicating that appeal alone did not explain the difference in behavioral effect.
Source: Lindsey Craig – University of Toronto
Image source: Image adapted from the University of Toronto news release
Original research: Nicole E. Larsen, Kang Lee, and Patricia A. Ganea. “Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?” published in Developmental Science.
University of Toronto. “Human Characters, Not Animals, Teach Children Best Moral Lessons.” NeuroscienceNews. 18 August 2017.
Abstract
Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?
For generations, adults have used stories to entertain children and to teach moral values that promote prosocial behavior. Many traditional and contemporary tales use anthropomorphized animals under the assumption that children will learn from such characters as effectively as, or better than, from human characters. This experimental study tested that assumption by presenting preschoolers with a sharing story featuring either human characters, anthropomorphized animals, or an unrelated control narrative. Reading the human-character version significantly increased children’s altruistic giving, while the anthropomorphic and control versions did not. These results suggest that realistic stories with human characters are more effective than anthropomorphic animal stories for encouraging prosocial behavior in young children.