Realistic stories promote prosocial behaviors in young children than anthropomorphic ones. This has been the finding of a 2018 experimental study that compared the effect of reading or sharing stories with either human characters or anthropomorphized animal characters on preschoolers. The results of this study yielded that reading human stories increased preschoolers’ children’s altruistic giving while reading the anthropomorphic story reduced it. This finding contradicts the popular belief that children learn from stories with anthropomorphized animals as effectively as those narratives with human characters. (1)
- (1) Larsen NE, Lee K, Ganea PA. Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children? Dev Sci. 2018 May;21(3):e12590. doi: 10.1111/desc.12590. Epub 2017 Aug 2. PMID: 28766863. [Abstract]
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