The Development of Giving in Forms of Object Exchange: Exploring the Roots of Communication and Morality in Early Interaction around Objects

Abstract

Giving is an act of great social importance across cultures, with communicative as well as moral dimensions because it is linked to sharing and fairness. We critically evaluate various explanations for how this social process develops in infancy and take a process-relational approach, using naturalistic observations to illustrate forms of interaction involving the exchange of objects and possible developmental trajectories for the emergence of different forms of giving. Based on our data, we propose that the object becomes a pivot point for interaction, and through the process of such interaction the social actions of showing and giving emerge and take on diverse social meanings within the relations between infants and caregivers.

Showing and giving: from incipient to conventional forms

“…On some accounts, it is only after infants have undergone relevant cognitive developments (such as means-ends understanding [ 2 ] and understanding of attention and intentions [ 30 ]) that they can start to produce intentionally communicative gestures, suggesting that behaviours that occur prior to this understanding are not relevant. However, even if these behaviours are initially non-communicative, it does not preclude them from playing a role in the developmental pathway towards showing [ 7 , 21 ]. Even unintentional behaviours, as long as they are show-like, could elicit a positive response from caregivers, which in turn would encourage infants to engage in further instances of these behaviours, providing a cycle of learning from which infants could gradually become aware of the effects of these actions [ 21 ].…”

“…Future work can explore what capacity and understanding infants might possess at different stages of gesture development, and, as some researchers have already begun to do with the development of giving [19,[21][22][23][24][25], can also more closely examine changes at the level of the caregiverinfant dyad. By examining the capacities of infants (at the level of the infant), as well as developments in patterns of shared activity at the level of the dyad, it will be possible to articulate the key cognitive, motor and interactive processes that contribute to the emergence of infants' earliest gestures.…”

“…By contrast, some studies have explored the development of giving gestures. Carpendale et al [21] reported diary entries in which caregivers described the giving behaviours of their children from 7.5 months to 2 years, 6 months of age. They reported some descriptions of behaviours that preceded conventional giving gestures.…”

Conceptualizations of Knowledge in Structuring Approaches to Moral Development: A Process-Relational Approach

“…There are many recent claims that some aspects of morality are innate (e.g., Hauser, 2006a , b ; Hamlin et al, 2007 ; Mikhail, 2007 , 2020 ; Bloom, 2010 , 2012 ; Hamlin, 2013 ; Margolis and Laurence, 2013 ; Warneken, 2016 ). Bloom ( 2010 , p. 46), for example, claimed that humans, “have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.… Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.” There is ongoing debate regarding this claim (e.g., Prinz, 2009 ; Sterelny, 2010 ), and elsewhere we have criticized nativist approaches making claims that infants are born with innate principles of fairness ( Carpendale et al, 2021 ), an innate moral core ( Carpendale et al, 2013 ), and innate altruism ( Carpendale et al, 2015 ; Carpendale and Lewis, 2021 ). Here we focus our critical attention primarily on one highly cited approach and we check the foundations of Moral Foundation Theory ( Graham et al, 2013 ).…”

“…That is, what is required is something in the system like a small person that attributes meaning to the representation, just as a person must attribute meaning to the input and output of a computer. This, of course, is problematic because it just puts off rather than provides an explanation (for further criticism of the computational theory of mind see e.g., Heil, 1981 ; Carpendale et al, 2021 ; Carpendale and Lewis, 2021 ).…”