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Adults are often embarrassed about asking for help. Its an act that can make people feel sensitive. The moment you ask for directions, after all, you reveal (泄露) that you may be lost. Seeking someone’s assistance can make you feel like you are broadcasting your incompetence. New research suggests young children don’t seek help in school, even when they need it, for the same reason.

To learn more about how children think about seeking help, we asked 576 children, ages four to nine, to predict the behavior of two kids in a story. One of the characters genuinely wanted to be smart, and the other merely wanted to seem smart to others.

Children thought that the kid who wanted to seem smart would be less likely to ask for assistance. They could still conceive of (想象) situations in which the kid who wanted to seem smart would seek help: when assistance could be sought privately (on a computer rather than in person), children thought both characters were equally likely to ask for it.

We also found that they recognize several more behaviors that might make a child appear less smart in front of fellow kids, such as admitting to failure or modestly downplaying successes. Children are therefore acutely aware of several ways in which a person’s actions might make them appear less clever in the eyes of others.

However, a number of solutions can be found to help children. Our Gist instinct may be to motivate seeking help by emphasizing its educational benefits. But reputational barriers likely require reputation-based solutions. For example, instructors could create activities in which each student becomes an “expert” on a different topic, and then children must ask one another for help to master all of die material. If seeking help is understood as a commonplace classroom activity, kids may be less likely to think of it as indicative (表明) of one’s ability.

Seeking help could even be framed as socially desirable. After all, asking for help often benefits not just die help seeker but also others listening in who have similar questions or struggles.