This MSCA has pushed the frontiers in developmental and comparative psychology in numerous ways:
Advancing the Understanding of Help-Seeking Development:
This action has significantly enhanced our understanding of the development and evolution of strategic help-seeking. Our findings reveal that while chimpanzees do seek help, they do not consider the effort required by potential helpers, suggesting that socially considerate help-seeking strategies may be unique to humans. Additionally, our research has provided new insights into the ontogeny of children’s epistemic help-seeking, highlighting sociocultural similarities differences. These significant results have been presented at major conferences such as the biennial meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, and the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, among others. The action has also facilitated inter-lab exchanges, with presentations at Lab Meetings at institutions such as the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of Vienna.
Contributing to the Open Science Movement:
The action has made substantial contributions to the open science movement. All anonymized data and statistical code produced in these studies have been published on the Open Science Framework (OSF), ensuring full transparency, fostering innovation, and accelerating collaboration. Furthermore, this action has pioneered the development of online study paradigms to investigate help-seeking behaviors. All stimuli for these online studies have been published, allowing for reuse and adaptation in future research.
Promoting Career Development:
The MSCA has significantly contributed to the Fellow securing an assistant professorship position. Additionally, the action has supported the careers of other young researchers. Two students at the University of California, Berkeley, expanded the research questions of the action and investigated the adaptiveness of children’s help-seeking in their honors thesis projects.
Raising Public Awareness:
The action has also created public awareness of the research conducted. To disseminate findings to a broader audience, results were presented at the European Science Night, local kindergartens and schools, and shared in newsletters sent to the parents of participating children. Study insights were also posted on Twitter. To ensure accessibility, all publications from this research are available online with open access.