Prosocial behavior requires both conceptual and motivational components. A full account of the development of prosocial behavior requires attention to the acquisition of both theory of mind and the tendency to organize action toward the interests of others and the future self. NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD AND ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT, no. 103, Spring 2004 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 51 4 Altruism, Prudence, and Theory of Mind in Preschoolers Chris Moore, Shannon Macgillivray The work reported in this chapter arose from two complementary lines of thinking. One was a consideration of the psychological mechanisms involved in organizing behavior that is not in the best immediate interests of the actor but rather is in the interests of someone else—in short, altru- ism. Clearly this issue is fundamentally about moral action. However, our thinking on the topic led us in a different direction from traditional work on the development of moral reasoning, which is primarily about the kinds of rules actors use to justify moral action (see Chapter Five, this volume). Instead, we considered how action could be motivated by interests or goals that were not the actor’s own immediate ones. Goals or interests that are not an actor’s own immediate ones include those that are attributable to another person or to the self in the future. We refer to these collectively as noncur- rent goals or interests. In drawing the distinction between immediate and noncurrent interests and goals, we were led also to consider the connection between altruism and prudence. By prudence, we mean action that is designed to bring about some future desired goal of the self at the expense of some immediate goal. Typical examples drawn from everyday life are dieting, training for a sporting event, and saving money. The work reported in this chapter was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the first author. We are grateful to Sandra Bosacki, Karen Lemmon, Shana Nichols, Carol Thompson, and Katie Walker for their assistance on the studies and to Jodie Baird and Bryan Sokol for valuable comments on an earlier draft. Chris Moore thanks John Barresi for many discussions on the theoreti- cal issues. This work would not have been possible without the dedication of our par- ticipant families, to whom we are especially grateful.