Picture a Reception classroom at tidy-up time. It is a made-up scene, but anyone who has worked with young children will recognise it. The teacher wants the floor cleared before lunch, so she tries two different sentences. On Monday she says, “Can everyone help tidy up, please?” On Tuesday she says, “Who’s going to be a helper today?”
The difference is one word. On Monday tidying is something you do. On Tuesday it is something you are. Small children are remarkably alert to that difference, and the research on it is more interesting, and more mixed, than the cheerful “just call them helpers” advice that sometimes does the rounds.
What happens when helping becomes an identity
In 2014, Christopher Bryan, Allison Master and Gregory Walton ran two experiments with 149 children aged three to six, published in Child Development. Some children heard an adult talk about “being a helper”, others heard about “helping”, and in a baseline condition neither phrase was used. Children who heard the noun helped significantly more across four tasks than children in either of the other groups, and the effect held even when the helping was for a new adult. The authors’ explanation is that noun wording makes a behaviour feel like a sign of the kind of person you are, and that children are motivated to claim a positive identity.
The same idea seems to work in the other direction. Bryan, Gabrielle Adams and Benoît Monin (2013) gave adult participants a chance to claim money they were not entitled to. When the instructions said “Please don’t be a cheater” rather than “Please don’t cheat”, people claimed less, and the “cheater” group showed no evidence of cheating at all (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General). Nobody wants to become the noun.
This fits a wider body of work on moral identity. Sam Hardy and Gustavo Carlo describe moral identity as the degree to which being a moral person matters to someone’s sense of who they are, and their 2011 review presents evidence linking it to moral action, while also giving the concept a critical evaluation rather than treating it as settled.
It also fits the way I think about character in school. In the Character Loop, actions lead to reflection, reflection shapes identity, and identity influences the next action. “Be a helper” is an adult trying to jump straight to the identity part of that loop. Sometimes that works. The question is what happens when the action goes wrong.
The spilled milk problem
Six years later, Emily Foster-Hanson, Andrei Cimpian, Rachel Leshin and Marjorie Rhodes asked exactly that question, again in Child Development. They worked with 139 four- and five-year-olds. Some were asked to “be helpers”, others “to help”. The children then pretended to complete a series of tasks, some successful and some not, such as trying to pour milk and spilling it.
After the unsuccessful trials, the children who had been asked to be helpers had more negative attitudes. In a second study, asking children to “be helpers” impeded their helping after they had run into difficulties while trying to help. The same wording that lifted helping when things went smoothly seems to have made setbacks feel heavier.
That makes sense once you think about it from the child’s side. If helping is something I do, a spill is a spill. If being a helper is who I am, a spill raises an uncomfortable question about whether I really am one. It is the same trap I described in “You’re So Clever” and What It Quietly Teaches. A label that feels like a gift on a good day can become something to protect on a bad one.
Small words, big claims
There is a further reason for caution. A related study by Bryan, Walton, Todd Rogers and Carol Dweck (2011) reported that asking people about “being a voter” rather than “voting” raised turnout in two small field experiments. When Alan Gerber and colleagues ran a large-scale field experiment testing the same idea, they found no meaningful difference between the noun and verb wording, and estimated that both were less effective than a standard get-out-the-vote message (PNAS, 2016). A further replication by Gerber, Huber and Fang also found no effect (Political Psychology, 2018).
Voting is not tidying up a classroom, and adults are not four-year-olds, so this does not cancel out the helping studies. What it does is remind me that a single word, tested in a laboratory, is a fragile thing to build a behaviour policy on. The helping experiments were short, carefully controlled sessions. They tell us something real about how young children respond to identity language in the moment. They do not tell us what a year of being called a helper does to a child’s character.
What I take from it
My reading, and it is an interpretation rather than a finding, is that identity language is powerful and should be handled with care. A few things follow for me.
First, invitations and verdicts are different. “Who would like to be a helper?” invites a child into an identity they can try on. “You’re a helper” or “You’re not being a very good helper” pronounces a verdict on who they are. The research does not test this distinction directly, but the spilled milk findings suggest the verdict is where the risk sits.
Second, setbacks need their own language. If a child who wants to be a helper drops the paint pots, the most useful thing an adult can say probably points back to the action: “That spilled. What could we do to sort it out?” That keeps the identity intact while the child repairs the mistake, which is close to the logic of the questions I ask after a behaviour incident, moving from what happened towards what can be put right.
Third, the identity has to be the child’s, not ours. One of my worries about any clever wording is that it can become a softer form of pressure. I wrote recently about children who behave well because they would feel bad if they didn’t. A child who helps mainly to protect a label an adult gave them may be closer to that than to a value they genuinely hold. In the Character Loop, the reflection that matters most is the one the child arrives at: “I noticed someone needed help and I did something about it. What does that say about me?”
That question is slower than “Be a helper!” and it will not clear the floor before lunch. But it leaves the child to draw the conclusion, which means it still belongs to them on the day the milk goes everywhere.
References
- Bryan, C. J., Adams, G. S., & Monin, B. (2013). When cheating would make you a cheater: Implicating the self prevents unethical behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(4), 1001–1005. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030655
- Bryan, C. J., Master, A., & Walton, G. M. (2014). “Helping” versus “being a helper”: Invoking the self to increase helping in young children. Child Development, 85(5), 1836–1842. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12244
- Bryan, C. J., Walton, G. M., Rogers, T., & Dweck, C. S. (2011). Motivating voter turnout by invoking the self. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(31), 12653–12656. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1103343108
- Foster-Hanson, E., Cimpian, A., Leshin, R. A., & Rhodes, M. (2020). Asking children to “be helpers” can backfire after setbacks. Child Development, 91(1), 236–248. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13147
- Gerber, A. S., Huber, G. A., Biggers, D. R., & Hendry, D. J. (2016). A field experiment shows that subtle linguistic cues might not affect voter behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(26), 7112–7117. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1513727113
- Gerber, A. S., Huber, G. A., & Fang, A. H. (2018). Do subtle linguistic interventions priming a social identity as a voter have outsized effects on voter turnout? Evidence from a new replication experiment. Political Psychology, 39(4), 925–938. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12446
- Hardy, S. A., & Carlo, G. (2011). Moral identity: What is it, how does it develop, and is it linked to moral action? Child Development Perspectives, 5(3), 212–218. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2011.00189.x