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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1584248
This article is part of the Research Topic Cognitive Mechanisms Underpinning Pro-Social Behavior Across Cultures View all 7 articles
The effect of time pressure and ego depletion on young children's
Provisionally accepted- 1 Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China
- 2 Cognition and Human Behavior Key Laboratory, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan Province, China
- 3 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
Based on the theory of limited cognitive resources and the dual-process theory, this study explores the mechanisms by which time pressure (an external factor) and ego depletion (an internal factor) affect helping behavior in children aged 4 to 6 years through two experiments. Experiment 1 (n = 153, M = 5.42 years, SD = 0.71) examined the impact of time pressure on children's helping behavior, while Experiment 2 (n = 221, M = 5.41 years, SD = 0.76) investigated the role of ego depletion. The results revealed that both time pressure and ego depletion significantly inhibited children's helping behavior, with notable age-related differences in these effects: the helping behavior of 4-and 5-year-old children was significantly reduced under conditions of time pressure and resource depletion, whereas 6-year-old children demonstrated greater resistance to these disruptions. These findings suggest that children's helping behavior relies more on the cognitive processing of the deliberative system rather than the automatic responses of the intuitive system. Furthermore, as children grow older, they gradually develop more effective cognitive resource regulation abilities to counteract the negative effects of resource depletion.
Keywords: Helping Behavior, Time pressure, Ego Depletion, dual-process theory, cognitive resources
Received: 27 Feb 2025; Accepted: 27 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zha, Chen, Zhang and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Wenjie Zhang, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China
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