This chapter provides an overview of the similarities and differences in the development of prosociality across cultural contexts and examines the role of social cognitive and motivational factors in shaping cultural diversity. We focus on helping and sharing, examined most extensively across cultures. Low-cost helping and sharing show similar developmental trajectories and levels across cultures. Development of costly helping diverges across cultures in the second year. Costly sharing diverges around middle childhood, coinciding with children’s adherence to cooperative norms of their society. Social cognitive foundations of prosociality develop along similar trajectories, suggesting that diversity in costly prosocial behaviors is best explained by motivational processes. New research suggests that collaboration influences motivational processes, producing similar levels of costly prosociality across diverse societies. To identify the psychological and sociocultural mechanisms underlying human development, it is critical to merge deep understanding of the everyday lives of children with theoretically guided experiments.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland comprised four nations and around 41.5 million people in 1900, of whom 72 per cent lived in England. In Britain, an established two-party system operated and after the extensions of the vote in 1867 and 1884 enfranchised men (about 60 per cent of men of voting age) could choose between the Liberal and Conservative parties. Most of the craft trade unions looked to the Liberal Party for social improvements and elements of liberalism had reached deep into the organized working class. But a working-class Conservative vote was also established. The parliamentary system enjoyed a wide popular legitimacy, as did the constitutional monarchy and an empire which even the left could justify (in terms of trusteeship). Prosperity was thought to depend on free trade even though Britain was the only major industrial country that took this view. At home Parliament enacted meaningful reforms often enough to give reformers belief and encouragement.

Introduction

At some point during our inaugural research team workshop we started to generate many different ideas about how to increase participation in heritage decision-making. We tried to keep track as the questions flowed by writing recurring words on pieces of paper, to be linked, connected and ordered at some later point. The words were in some ways not surprising. Heritage, of course. Stewardship. Custodianship. Expert. Leadership. Institutions. Ownership. Differences/Tensions. Scale. Personal. Values. Voice (‘+ not heard’, was added in another hand in biro). So far, so predictable. These words, after all, index the big conceptual challenges that have been identified to a greater or lesser extent in heritage policy, practice and its research for the last four decades. Yet as we spoke, each of these terms started to change in dimension. As the different people around the table gave examples, and checked they understood each other's contributions, the familiar words were in the process of gathering new uncertainties and ambiguities as well as new colours, textures, shapes and potentials.

We were brought together by a funding scheme that supported not just collaborative research, but also its collaborative design. While we did have a shared interest in our overall question ‘how should heritage decisions be made?’, we – as you will see by how we describe ourselves – came to this question, and our first workshop, from quite different places and different trajectories. To frame it in the language implied by this book, we carried with us different inheritances – legacies – from our disciplines, professional backgrounds, organisations and places. As such, the other crucial thing we had in common was an interest in the potential for rethinking ‘heritage’ offered by drawing on many different perspectives and working across hierarchies and institutional boundaries. We used both these shared commitments and our different perspectives to collaboratively design our project.

In this chapter we tell the story of our project with the aim of showing how our research emerged through dynamic connections between know-how generated through practitioner reflections, dialogue, characterised by conversations between us as a project team and conceptual innovation, in terms of the way this allowed us to think about heritage and decision making differently.