ABSTRACT
This chapter presents both theoretically and empirically, that Piaget's concepts of affirmation and negation and his ideas on costs and gains involved in children's centrations and operations are of value in helping understand empirical phenomena of children's development of prosocial behavior. The cost-perception/gain-construction perspective has other noteworthy aspects. First, this perspective articulates functional and structural features in children's development of prosocial behavior. Applied to children's development of prosocial behavior, the integration of these two Piagetian models leads to the idea that younger children's tendency to be less prosocial than older children is partly due to the young child's propensity to think of prosocial acts in terms of cost and affirmation than in terms of gain and negation. Since the translation of Piaget's Sociological Studies in 1995, it is clear that the widespread belief that Piaget's theory is inherently individualistic and leaves no room for the role of the social in development is misleading at its best, nonsensical at its worst.
