The Developmental Peacebuilding Model (DPM) of children’s prosocial behaviors in settings of intergroup conflict

— The persistence of intergroup conﬂicts around the world creates urgency for research on child development in such settings. Complementing what we know about internalizing and externalizing developmental outcomes, in this article, I shift the focus to children’s prosocial behaviors and more speciﬁcally, the Developmental Peacebuilding Model (DPM). The DPM makes three main contributions: It (a) integrates a developmental intergroup framework and socioecological perspective with a peace-building paradigm to examine the target and type of children’s prosocial behavior in settings of intergroup conﬂict; (b) outlines how children’s outgroup prosocial behaviors, which promote constructive change at different levels of social ecology, can be understood as peace building and fostering social cohesion; and (c) has implications for research and global policy.

The Developmental Peacebuilding Model (DPM) of Children's Prosocial Behaviors in Settings of Intergroup Conflict and social implications of children's prosocial behaviors as building peace and promoting social cohesion (e.g., Taylor et al., 2014Taylor et al., , 2018)).Although my focus is on societies affected by conflict, the DPM has implications for the development of intergroup prosociality in other divided or diverse settings.

DEVELOPMENTAL PEACEBUILDING MODEL FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH
Psychologists typically study children's prosocial behavior at the interpersonal level (i.e., within the microsystem).The DPM expands and deepens that understanding by introducing a peace-building paradigm; this novel approach highlights the target, or recipient, of prosociality, as well as the type of benefit or social change it aims to advance (see Figure 1).Framed in this light, children's actions can be seen as contributing to peace building and social cohesion, with far-reaching implications.Moreover, the DPM offers direction for process-oriented research.For example, it outlines how children and youth may build on interpersonal (i.e., microsystem) prosocial behaviors to promote structural and cultural (i.e., exo-and macrosystem) change (e.g., Taylor et al., 2018).This potential to test directionality (e.g., Does interpersonal helping precede intergroup helping?), explore cross-level interactions (e.g., Does donating interact with volunteering to promote structural change?), and link children's prosocial behaviors with an ethos of peace (Bar-Tal, 2009) demonstrate promising applications of the DPM.
Theoretically, the DPM integrates three bodies of work: peace building, a developmental intergroup framework, and a social ecological perspective.Peace building is understood as nonviolent and constructive actions taken to address the immediate and root causes of political conflict and promote social cohesion (Lederach, 1997).Moreover, peace building is oriented to the future rather than focused on past wrongs (McKeown & Taylor, 2017), which positions children and youth as critical "resources, not recipients" (Lederach, 1997, p. 94).Extending the traditional focus of peace studies on adults, the DPM introduces a developmental perspective.This approach is crucial to understanding how children can be peace builders in conflictridden environments.Moreover, children born after a peace agreement is signed, called the post-accord generation, are in a key position to carry forward the peace-building agenda and promote social cohesion.
Particularly relevant to conflict-affected societies, the DPM adapts a developmental intergroup framework (Abrams & Killen, 2014), which was originally used to study social exclusion.Through this approach, the DPM differentiates among the targets of children's prosocial behaviors, with particular attention to acts directed at conflict-related or political rival outgroups (see Figure 1).Rather than analyzing how political violence heightens outgroup exclusion or ingroup cohesion, the DPM explores prosocial behavior as a factor that can promote social cohesion across rival groups.Thus, the DPM transforms our understanding of children's prosocial behavior: By explicitly helping the other in a setting of intergroup conflict, children can contribute to peace building.
Although a social ecology perspective is typically used to understand how factors at different levels affect the developing child, the DPM shifts the focus to the outward nature of the bidirectional relations inherent in this perspective (see arrows in   Merrilees, Taylor, & Shirlow, 2014); that is, how do children affect their social worlds?Complementing earlier work on various forms of prosocial behavior (e.g., public, compliant; see Carlo & Randall, 2002), the DPM highlights how different types of prosocial acts aim to benefit or promote change at different levels of social ecology.Roughly mapping onto the levels of the social ecology and peace-building paradigm, the DPM outlines different types of prosocial actions aimed at personal (individual), interpersonal (microsystem), structural (exosystem), and cultural (macrosystem) change (Figure 1).
Relevant to the more than 420 million children growing up amid conflict (Save the Children, 2019) and the societies in which they live, in the following sections, I integrate developmental literature to identify how children can constructively influence their divided environments.In the article's final sections, I outline how the DPM opens new lines of inquiry with implications for global policy.

HELPING OTHERS: INTERPERSONAL PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR
Developmental perspectives on prosocial behavior are valuable, since early levels of such behaviors have implications across the lifespan (Bowman, Brandenberger, Lapsey, Hill, & Quaranto, 2010).Eisenberg and colleagues defined prosocial behavior as voluntary behavior aimed primarily at benefitting another person (Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Knafo-Noam, 2015).(Killen & Turiel, 1998) as youth become aware that helping is valued.These developmental changes, in cognitive capacities and social experiences and motives, may influence who and how children choose to help.Within the microsystem, a bias in interpersonal prosocial behaviors toward those more similar to oneself can be observed early in development.For example, 2-year-olds prefer to act prosocially toward their mothers than to strangers (Young, Fox, & Zahn-Waxler, 1999), and 3-to 5-year-olds feel more obliged to help friends or family than strangers (Olson & Spelke, 2008).Moreover, 4-to 6-year-olds allocate more resources to friends than to strangers (Moore, 2009).This pattern continues across development, with adolescents more likely to help someone with whom they are in a close relationship than someone they know less well (Killen & Turiel, 1998).Longitudinal research also indicates different trajectories of prosocial behavior depending on the target (i.e., friends, family, and strangers; Padilla-Walker, Carlo, & Memmott-Elison, 2018).Thus, interpersonal prosocial behaviors tend to target those more similar to the self.But does this pattern hold for targets from socially relevant, rival outgroups?

HELPING THE OTHER: INTERGROUP PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR
The DPM calls for specificity in understanding the target of children's prosocial actions.In experimental studies, children are less likely to offer interpersonal help with imagined outgroup members than with ingroup members (e.g., Sierksma, Thijs, & Verkuyten, 2015) or share resources with students in another class (Fehr, Bernhard, & Rockenbach, 2008).In the microsystem, these biases in children's interpersonal prosociality across group lines have been found in both experimental studies using a minimal group paradigm (used in social psychology, this paradigm involves randomly assigning participants to arbitrary groups; Study 1 in Abrams, Van de Vyver, Pelletier, & Cameron, 2015), and real-life settings with relevant rival outgroups (e.g., donating resources between Israeli/Jewish and Arab/Muslim children; Shamoa-Nir, Razpurker-Apfeld, Dautel, & Taylor, 2020).Several key constructs-exposure to conflict and threat of conflict, contact, group norms, empathy, and social identity-can help explain the gap in prosocial behavior directed toward an outgroup member.
Particularly relevant to settings of conflict, children's personal experiences and their group's history of victimization may shape prosocial responses.In part, the lack of specificity in the target of prosocial acts may help explain divergent findings in which children's personal exposure to political violence has been associated with both lower (e.g., Croatia; Kereste s, 2006) and higher (e.g., Uganda; Blattman, 2009) levels of general prosocial behavior.If the rivalry and group competition remain high, children may also demonstrate lower outgroup prosocial behavior in using a minimal group paradigm (Study 2 in Abrams et al., 2015).Moreover, the type of perceived threat matters.For example, experiencing intragroup threat (i.e., from ingroup members) predicted higher outgroup prosocial behavior a year later among adolescents in Northern Ireland (Taylor et al., 2014).These findings demonstrate the importance of specifying the target to understand children's prosocial acts more completely.
Societies affected by conflict are often very segregated; the lack of cross-group contact hinders opportunities for outgroup prosocial behavior.Moreover, outgroup prosocial behavior may be perceived as violating group norms of loyalty, resulting in social penalties or physical punishments even in minimal group paradigms (Abrams et al., 2015).The potential backlash for helping across group lines, particularly targeting rival outgroups, may be more pronounced in societies affected by conflict.Yet group norms can also be supportive (Rutland, Killen, & Abrams, 2010).When contact does occur, it can play an important role in promoting prosociality toward outgroup members.In a study of a society affected by conflict, both the quality and quantity of intergroup contact mediated the impact of positive intergroup peer norms on outgroup prosocial behaviors (McKeown & Taylor, 2018).That is, peer norms supportive of cross-group contact were related to greater quality and quantity of contact, which were linked with positive outgroup prosocial behaviors targeting a rival outgroup.
Meaningful contact also has been linked with empathy across contexts (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008), which underpins interpersonal prosocial behaviors toward imagined (Sierksma et al., 2015) and rival (Taylor et al., 2020) outgroups.For example, in one study, inducing empathy in children influenced the degree of ingroup bias in prosocial behaviors across group lines (8-to 13-year-olds; Sierksma et al., 2015).In another study in Northern Ireland, the link from empathy to helping intentions also was stronger for outgroup than ingroup targets (Taylor & Hanna, 2018).In both children and adolescents, empathy was related to outgroup prosocial behaviors toward members of the rival outgroup in a conflict setting (Taylor et al., 2020).Moreover, empathy for the outgroup as a whole, compared to empathy for a member of that group, is influential in cross-group helping among cultural groups (e.g., German/Muslim) as well as minimal groups (St€ urmer, Snyder, Kropp, & Siem, 2006).
Beyond the physical reality of conflict, divided social lives often shape children's identities (Merrilees et al., 2014), with implications for intergroup prosocial behavior.For example, children who identified more strongly with a conflict-related group were less likely to share resources with an outgroup member in a setting of protracted rivalry (O'Driscoll, Taylor, & Dautel, 2018).Yet with age, children in the United States also showed a greater ability to understand group-based inequalities and recognize inequalities based on structure (e.g., gender) versus individuality (e.g., merit; Rizzo, Elenbaas, & Vanderbilt, 2018).In Northern Ireland, dispositional empathy shaped adolescents' perceptions of injustice in contexts of inequality (Urbanska, McKeown, & Taylor, 2019).Thus, individual differences may influence how children balance a sense of group identity with an understanding of inequalities.In conflict settings, in particular, such decisions about allocating resources might be framed by a zero-sum mentality; that is, choosing to give to an outgroup member may be perceived as a threat to the ingroup's social standing (O'Driscoll et al., 2018).
Most research on children's outgroup prosocial behaviors is focused on the microsystem.By contrast, the DPM outlines how interpersonal outgroup prosociality may have implications for broader social cohesion and peace building.

BEYOND INTERPERSONAL PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR: CHILDREN'S BROADER PEACE-BUILDING CONTRIBUTIONS
Interpersonal behavior (i.e., microsystem) aimed to benefit an individual rival outgroup member in a society affected by conflict may be an essential first step.However, we know less about other types of prosocial acts that target constructive social change at other levels of social ecology (Taylor et al., 2018).
The DPM aims to fill this void.First, the DPM conceptualizes civic engagement, or collective action to improve community well-being and address issues of public concern (Checkoway & Aldana, 2013), as a form of prosocial behavior in the exosystem that targets structural change.These types of prosociality can be both political and nonpolitical forms of collective action that address the structures of inequality or injustice in systems relevant for children and youth, such as schools or communities.
Second, the DPM outlines macrosystem prosocial action; this type of prosociality might include signing a petition for national or global cultural change.For example, many social media campaigns have been mounted (e.g., #Youth4Peace) and much activism has occurred around important international dates (e.g., #PeaceDay) in which children and youth take part annually.These types of macrosystem prosocial actions aim to indirectly improve the social welfare of people children may never meet.Moreover, in societies affected by conflict, exo-and macrosystem outgroup prosocial behaviors may be an important aspect in the unfreezing process (Bar-Tal & Halperin, 2009), aiming to change the ethos from one of conflict to one of peace (Bar-Tal, 2009).
Thus, the DPM distinguishes among prosocial behaviors based on the type of constructive social change and the level of social ecology they aim to address (Figure 1).Outgroup prosocial behavior in the microsystem may be linked to a broader prosociality in the exo-and macrosystem.That is, developmentally, children's peace-building potential increases as their agency grows.With age, children generally have greater autonomy in moving through their environments and may encounter more systems within their social ecologies.Young people may take part in other types of outgroup prosocial acts, such as civic engagement or support for political parties that advocate peace over polarization, that address broader structural or cultural change.Together, these types of prosociality (i.e., helping the greater collective good) also can be understood as children's contributions to peace building.Identifying the psychological mechanisms that promote such peace building, particularly among children and youth of a post-accord generation, is essential to advancing public policies on social cohesion.
However, research is limited on the exo-and macrosystem types of children's prosociality and peace building as outlined by the DPM.For example, in longitudinal analyses of a postaccord generation in Northern Ireland, family cohesion mediated Child Development Perspectives, Volume 14, Number 3, 2020, Pages 127-134 the link from perceived intergroup conflict to social and political engagement (Taylor et al., 2019).That is, if young people perceived more conflict, they turned to their families for support and understanding over time; this support, in turn, was associated with more frequent civic engagement a year later.In addition, in a study of adolescents, contact in interpersonal outgroup prosocial behavior played an important role for exosystemic prosociality: Higher quality and quantity of intergroup contact was associated with greater support for peace building which, in turn, was related to more frequent political participation and volunteering in Northern Ireland (McKeown & Taylor, 2017).Finally, in another study in Northern Ireland, trajectories of adolescents' interpersonal prosocial behaviors toward any target predicted levels of social and political engagement (Taylor et al., 2018).Demonstrating cross-level connections, changes in interpersonal/microsystem prosociality were linked with structural/exosystemic prosocial action.Although we need more research, the DPM outlines how children's behavioral changes within interpersonal relations, such as cross-group helping or sharing with a rival in a conflict environment, may enable peace building on a more expansive scale.

DIRECTIONS FOR PROCESS-ORIENTED
The DPM offers a useful model to integrate findings and guide research.Researchers need to synthesize how socializing agents and contextual factors influence children's peace building.Most research has focused on how factors in the microsystem influence children's prosociality; the study of exosystem and macrosystem factors has been more limited.For example, family cohesion has been associated positively with interpersonal prosocial behavior, volunteering, and later civic engagement in a context of political conflict (e.g., Taylor et al., 2019).Neighborhood cohesion also has positively and directly affected prosocial behavior in Italy (Lenzi et al., 2012).Finally, comparing predictors of children's prosocial behaviors across different macrosystems through cross-national research is an essential piece of this puzzle, but is still lacking (for exceptions, see Carlo, Koller, Eisenberg, Da Silva, & Frohlich, 1996, comparing the United States and Brazil;B€ ahr et al., in press, comparing Northern Ireland, Croatia, Kosovo, the Republic of Macedonia, and Israel).For the most part, studies about broader influences on children's prosocial behavior are rare.
Developmental scientists must also be supported to navigate complex ethical and political issues.For example, children and youth from societies affected by conflict should be integrally incorporated into this research agenda; translational research is strengthened through coproduction.Creating local advisory councils with youth that represent different sides of a conflict may be a first step.Moreover, prosocial behavior may not be exclusively positive.Offering dependency-oriented versus autonomy-oriented help to lower-status groups has been linked with maintaining power and superiority or strengthening social dominance in both minimal and real groups in Israel (Nadler, Harpaz-Gorodeisky, & Ben-David, 2009).In particular, when higher-status groups feel threatened, they may offer forms of assistance that maintain the status quo (van Leeuwen & T€ auber, 2010).For example, the 1% may donate to charity rather than support systematic tax reform or poverty alleviation.Therefore, what might be understood initially as prosocial (e.g., donating to charity) may reinforce structural marginalization.This dark side of helping, including the underlying motives and potential unintentional negative consequences, should be examined.At the same time, we must reflect on the reality of more vulnerable groups acting prosocially toward those engaging in genocidal practices, for example.Wrestling with these complex questions underpins this area of research.
Interdisciplinary partnerships also may be particularly useful to address political issues.For example, cooperating with education, sociology, political science, geography, economics, and other fields may help researchers develop innovative designs that can assess many levels of social ecology.Through these types of collaboration, multilevel interactions can be examined -both in terms of their influences on children's prosociality (e.g., how macrosystem norms interact with exosystem institutional structures or microsystem peer relations) and the combined impact of the different types of prosocial actions (e.g., interpersonal helping interacting with volunteering to influence a broader ethos of peace).These are just some of the dynamic research questions that the DPM may generate to understand children's contributions to peace building.
The DPM calls for two other types of research designs.First, we urgently need longitudinal research to explore trajectories in the development of different targets and types of prosocial behavior.This type of research design can also help tease out the directionality proposed by the DPM; for example, does interpersonal prosociality develop before types that engage with other levels of the social ecology (e.g., collective action), and which institutional structures, such as educational initiatives, help accelerate prosocial trajectories with age?Second, to understand broader macrosystem factors, we also need cross-cultural studies.As with all developmental research, including children in non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) countries is essential to tease apart the universal and unique dimensions and the potential long-term impact of children's peace building.
In this section, I highlighted how the DPM sets an agenda for research.This type of culturally informed, interdisciplinary, dynamic, multilevel, longitudinal, cross-national research requires funding.As with many areas of cutting-edge research, it is lack of support, rather than capacity or ambition, that prevents change.Funding cycles that allow sufficient time to involve key stakeholders, reflect on potential ethical issues, include interdisciplinary approaches and methods, and study the same children over time across different non-WEIRD settings of intergroup conflict will help realize this line of inquiry.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Evidence-based practice should underpin public policy.According to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, half of the world's children experience violence every year.Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16, to foster peace, justice, and strong institutions, is of crucial importance.The DPM outlines ways to assess how prosocial actions among children and youth, particularly those promoting change in the exo-and macrosystem, can contribute to SDG 16.A (strengthening relevant institutions) and SDG 16.B (promoting and enforcing nondiscriminatory laws and policies).Relatedly, given the divided nature of many societies affected by conflict, inclusive quality education (SDG4) provides another policy lever to promote children's peace building.A protective school environment may foster the ability to help others, even potential rivals, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Aber et al., 2017).Given that prosocial behavior emerges early in development, interventions that promote emotionally and educationally supportive environments are essential.By linking how helping others can translate even to rival outgroups among children in societies affected by conflict, this article contributes to the growing empirical and policy-oriented work (e.g., United Nations Security Council Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace and Security; UNSCR, 2250UNSCR, , 2015) ) by recognizing that children and youth "contribute to the maintenance and promotion of international peace and security" (para.19).

CONCLUSION
Children and adolescents have the potential to build peace.The DPM integrates children's prosocial behavior, a psychological concept traditionally studied at the interpersonal level, into a peace-building paradigm, providing a novel perspective with far-reaching implications.Theoretically, understanding outgroup prosocial behavior as a form of peace building recognizes children as influential agents and crucial partners to foster peace (McKeown & Taylor, 2017;Taylor et al., 2018Taylor et al., , 2019Taylor et al., , 2020)).Distinguishing and linking different targets and types of prosociality also has empirical and practical implications.For example, while interventions focusing on interpersonal prosocial behavior may be effective, the underlying theory of change toward wider social cohesion is often assumed or underdeveloped.The DPM outlines how children and youth may build on interpersonal (i.e., microsystem) prosocial behaviors to promote structural and cultural (i.e., exo-and macrosystem) changes that can transform the sociopsychological infrastructure in conflict settings (Bar-Tal & Halperin, 2009).This type of research is urgently needed for the nearly one fifth of children worldwide affected by conflict (Save the Children, 2019).

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The Developmental Peacebuilding Model (DPM) integrates a socio-ecological perspective (bold labels), peace-building paradigm (italic labels) and developmental intergroup framework to examine the target and type of children's prosocial behavior (examples in boxes) in settings of intergroup conflict.

Figure 1 ;
Figure1; Cummings, Goeke-Morey,Merrilees, Taylor, & Shirlow, 2014); that is, how do children affect their social worlds?Complementing earlier work on various forms of prosocial behavior (e.g., public, compliant; seeCarlo & Randall, 2002), the DPM highlights how different types of prosocial acts aim to benefit or promote change at different levels of social ecology.Roughly mapping onto the levels of the social ecology and peace-building paradigm, the DPM outlines different types of prosocial actions aimed at personal (individual), interpersonal (microsystem), structural (exosystem), and cultural (macrosystem) change (Figure1).Relevant to the more than 420 million children growing up amid conflict (Save the Children, 2019) and the societies in which they live, in the following sections, I integrate developmental literature to identify how children can constructively influence their divided environments.In the article's final sections, I outline how the DPM opens new lines of inquiry with implications for global policy.