Counting and Pro-Social Behaviour
Two aspects of pro-social behaviour - sharing (of resources), and instrumental helping (ie: offering to help) - have been theorised as "distinct behaviours, each with differentiated underlying mechanisms, developmental trajectories, ans neural substrates" (Sohail et al 2022 p291). For example, in the first two years of life, "early helping appears to be intrinsically motivated, requiring little explicit encouragement..., whereas sharing, relies more heavily on cueing..., and appears more difficult to motivate even when the recipient's desires are clear" (Sohail et al 2022 p291).
The development of these two abilities may be linked to specific cognitive abilities. Sohail et al (2022) investigated numerical cognition (or counting proficiency) with 85 pre-schoolers in the USA.
In a repeated measures design, the children performed a sharing task and a helping task in a randomised order. In the former, children could share their ten stickers with a sad puppet who had none. There was no direct encouragement of sharing by the experimenter. In the helping task, the children could aid a puppet completing a sticker task by using their stickers. Numerical cognition of 1-6 was tested with a pile of plastic ducks, and six questions like, "can you give me one duck?". "Proficient counters" got six correct answers.
"Basic" pro-social behaviour (defined as giving at least one sticker) was shown by 94% of children in the helping condition and 96% in the sharing condition. But "precise" or "equal" pro-social behaviour (defined as giving five stickers) was 13% and 34% respectively.
Numerical cognition was found to predict sharing, but not helping behaviour: "That is, compared with children who were not yet proficient counters, children who were proficient counters were more likely to share resources equally during the sharing task, but were no more likely to exhibit preciseness in helping behaviour" (Sohail et al 2022 p297). Sohail et al's (2022) conclusion was that "numerical cognition does not support pro-social behaviour in general, but rather that number cognition is uniquely recruited to resolve the competing demands (self versus other) of sharing" (p298).
This was a laboratory-based experiment with specifically created games to measure behaviours.
Reference
Sohail, S et al (2022) Dissociable mechanisms for diverse pro-social behaviours: Counting skills predict sharing behaviour, but not instrumental helping Journal of Cognition and Development 23, 2, 289-303