Infants’ preference for prosocial behaviors: A literature review

Abstract

In 2007, a study carried out by Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom provided concrete evidence that infants as young as 6 months were capable of social evaluation, displaying an early preference for agents performing a prosocial behavior. Since then the development of early social abilities to judge other's behavior has been the topic of a growing body of research. The present paper reviews studies conducted between 2007 and 2015 that experimentally examined infants' social evaluation abilities by testing their preference for agents acting prosocially. We performed a detailed analysis of a corpus of 16 research studies including 59 experimental results, scrutinizing their methods and findings, and identifying their convergent and divergent features. This analysis showed that a preference for agents who perform prosocial behaviors (as opposed to antisocial or neutral) was present in a majority of infants, but some conflicting results have also been reported. The rich interpretation that infants are endowed with mature socio-moral evaluation abilities has not really been sufficiently discussed. In order to deepen this debate, we assessed other studies that have further explored infants' understanding of the social value of behaviors. Many of the studies provide evidence that young infants manage to identify and prefer the prosocial agent by taking into account the context and agents' mental states beyond the behavior itself. In this study two specific areas are assessed: (1) studies that have previously explored social evaluation abilities beyond a basic preference for prosocial behavior and (2) current theories which attempt to explain how and why such preferences could exist so early in infancy. Future directions for research on social evaluation abilities in infants are also discussed as well as a review of the literature.

Toddlers Selectively Help Fair Agents

“…Recent works on infants’ social preferences and expectations help us to address this question and constraint nativist and empiricist models of cognitive architecture and development (Margolis and Laurence, 2013; Tomasello and Vaish, 2013). In the first year, infants prefer agents who help others to agents who hinder others (Hamlin et al, 2007, 2011; Hamlin, 2013, 2015) and agents who comfort rather than harm (Buon et al, 2014; see also Holvoet et al, 2016). By 10 months, they expect agents to perform equal distributions (Meristo et al, 2016) and to act positively toward fair donors and negatively toward unfair donors (Meristo and Surian, 2013, 2014).…”

Third‐Party Sociomoral Evaluations in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Different from the explicit sensitivity that has been examined using traditional moral judgments tasks, implicit moral sensitivity is usually assessed with implicit measures, such as attention allocation, electrophysiological recordings (EEG), and functional MRI (fMRI). Studies using the preferential looking paradigm with typical infants have reliably found a visual preference for prosocial agents and an aversion to antisocial agents (e.g., Hamlin, ; Holvoet, Scola, Arciszewski, & Picard, ). Developmental neuroscience has demonstrated differential EEG responses in babies and young children when they view third‐party prosocial and antisocial behaviors (Cowell & Decety, 2015a, 2015b) or people in pain (Cheng, Chen, & Decety, ; Decety, Meidenbauer, & Cowell, ).…”

Is morality a gadget? Nature, nurture and culture in moral development

“…Of course, further testing may reveal that some of the mentalistic and nativist assumptions were justified, but the signs are not good. Where there has been closer examination, it has tended to support subpersonal explanations for phenomena that were assumed to reflect mindreading in infancy (Heyes 2014a;2014b;Holvoet 2016;Sabbagh & Paulus 2018). For example, evidence that infants are more likely to copy full actions (e.g.…”

“…One might expect the evidence for such a big claim to have been scrutinised with particular care, but it was five years before anyone noticed that the original study and many of the follow-up experiments contained a major confound: The helper shape was paired with an attractive bouncing movement at the top of the hill, and the hinderer shape was paired with an aversive collision event at the bottom, allowing infants to learn a helper preference by association (Scarf, Imuta, Columbo and Hayne 2012; reply from Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom 2012). Furthermore, it was nearly 10 years before it became clear that the basic effect was not replicating reliably outside the laboratory in which it was originally observed (Holvoet, Scola, Arciszewski and Picard 2016). The helper preference has been found in only 37% of experiments conducted by other researchers (Hinten, Labuschagne, Boden and Scarf 2018).…”