Young infants are pro‐victims, but it depends on the context

Uzefovsky, Florina; Paz, Yael; Davidov, Maayan

doi:10.1111/bjop.12402

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In their view, empathy does not develop in a stage‐like manner, and the ability to experience concern is not dependent on emerging cognitive capacities. Rather, concern for others, both affective and cognitive, is already present during the first year of life (see also Uzefovsky, Paz, & Davidov, 2019; Zahn‐Waxler et al, 2018). Concerned reactions do not require the cognitive ability of explicit self‐knowledge, but rather the more basic ability of implicit self‐other differentiation (Davidov et al., 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caring babies: Concern for others in distress during infancy

Davidov

Paz

Roth‐Hanania

et al. 2020

Developmental Science

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Concern for distressed others is a highly valued human capacity, but little is known about its early ontogeny. Theoretical accounts of empathy development have emphasized stages, but this has been called into question. This study sheds new light on four key issues: onset, consistency, development, and predictive power of early manifestations of concern for others. Three‐month‐old Israei infants (N = 165) were followed longitudinally at ages 6, 12, and 18 months, and their observed responses to others’ distress were assessed. Concern for distressed others was seen early in the first year of life, long before previous theories assumed. Empathic concern was moderately consistent across both situation and age, from as early as 3 months. Concern for others grew only modestly with age, plateauing during the second year, whereas prosocial behavior increased rapidly during the second year. Early individual differences in concern for others predicted later prosocial behavior on behalf of distressed others. Findings underscore the early roots of caring, and appear to refute assumptions of prior stage theories of empathy development, by showing that concern for others develops much earlier and more gradually than previously assumed.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caring babies: Concern for others in distress during infancy

Davidov

Paz

Roth‐Hanania

et al. 2020

Developmental Science

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“…Beyond instrumental helping, a preference for prosocial characters has been found in a number of other sociomoral domains. In the domain of physical aggression, for instance, infants preferred victims over perpetrators [10,11], and third-party characters intervening in a conflict to shield victims from ongoing aggression over passive bystanders [12]. Similarly, in the domain of resource allocation, infants have been repeatedly shown to prefer fair distributors over unfair ones [13][14][15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do 15-month-old infants prefer helpers? A replication of Hamlin et al . (2007)

Schlingloff¹,

Csibra

Tatone³

2020

R. Soc. open sci.

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Hamlin et al . found in 2007 that preverbal infants displayed a preference for helpers over hinderers. The robustness of this finding and the conditions under which infant sociomoral evaluation can be elicited has since been debated. Here, we conducted a replication of the original study, in which we tested 14- to 16-month-olds using a familiarization procedure with three-dimensional animated video stimuli. Unlike previous replication attempts, ours uniquely benefited from detailed procedural advice by Hamlin. In contrast with the original results, only 16 out of 32 infants (50%) in our study reached for the helper; thus, we were not able to replicate the findings. A possible reason for this failure is that infants' preference for prosocial agents may not be reliably elicited with the procedure and stimuli adopted. Alternatively, the effect size of infants’ preference may be smaller than originally estimated. The study addresses ongoing methodological debates on the replicability of influential findings in infant cognition.

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“…Secondly, we cannot rule out that the toddler had an empathic reaction towards the victim, and this played a role in generating the present findings (Bloom, 2013;de Wall, 2009). Previous studies found that preverbal infants possess rudimentary empathic skills, revealed by implicit, automatic responses toward distressed others (Kanakogi et al, 2013;Uzefovsky et al, 2020). We do not believe that toddlers' expectations about third-party punishments can be the result of cultural learning (Tomasello, 2019), as it is highly unlikely that they had the chance to witness an instance of corporal or other sorts of punishments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 60%