Experience facilitates the emergence of sharing behavior among 7.5-month-old infants.

Jing, Xu; Saether, Lucie; Sommerville, Jessica A.

doi:10.1037/dev0000174

Cited by 18 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Previous research has demonstrated that other aspects of infants’ fairness understanding is shaped by early experiences. For instance, the presence of siblings is related to infants’ fairness expectations [ 35 ], and both parental empathy and previous experience sharing is correlated with early prosocial behaviors [ 41 ]. Future research should test the extent to which these variables also influence infants’ ability to use fairness information when selecting a social partner.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fairness informs social decision making in infancy

2018

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The ability to reason about fairness plays a defining role in the development of morality. Thus, researchers have long been interested in understanding when and how a sensitivity to fairness first develops. Here, we examined infants’ ability to use fairness information in selecting social partners. Using a novel experimental paradigm that combined pre-recorded stimuli with an active behavioral measure, we tested whether infants preferred to socially engage with an individual they had previously seen behave fairly or unfairly. After viewing an individual distribute goods to third parties either equally (i.e., 3:3 distribution) or unequally (i.e., 5:1 distribution), both 13- and 17-month-old infants selectively chose to engage in a social interaction with (i.e., take a toy from) an individual who distributed resources equally. The use of a novel paradigm to assess infants’ fairness preferences demonstrates that infants’ previously established fairness preferences extend across different, more demanding paradigms, and may therefore be more enduring in nature. Together, these findings provide new insights into the nature of infants’ fairness representations, and fill in key gaps in the developmental timeline of infants’ ability to use fairness information in their consideration of potential social partners. In sum, these findings build on previous research by demonstrating that infants not only hold an expectation that resources should be distributed fairly, they also preferentially interact with those who have previously done so. The early-emerging ability to both reason about and use fairness information may play an influential role in the development of complex prosocial behaviors related to morality more broadly.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fairness informs social decision making in infancy

2018

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“…Interestingly, parents of 18‐month‐old nonhelpers on the instrumental task reported that they were less engaged in socializing their toddlers' prosocial behavior than were the parents of helpers. Other recent research has reported relations between parents' interactional style and infants' ability to encode goal‐directed actions (Licata et al., ); between parental empathy (Xu, Saether, & Sommerville, ) or perspective taking (Cowell & Decety, ) and sharing in infants and toddlers; between parents' emotion talk with their toddlers and children's helping and sharing (Brownell, Svetlova et al., ); and between parent scaffolding during cleanup and toddlers' helping (Hammond & Carpendale, ; Pettygrove et al., ), in line with the argument that socialization influences multiple aspects of early prosociality and does so in a multitude of ways (Brownell & Early Social Development Research Lab, ). In the current study we cannot determine how parent socialization of prosocial behavior may have influenced toddlers' helping and nonhelping behavior.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Help Yourself!” What Can Toddlers' Helping Failures Tell Us About the Development of Prosocial Behavior?

Waugh

Brownell

2017

Infancy

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Prosocial behavior emerges in the second year of life, yet it is typical for children in this period not to share, comfort, or help. We compared toddlers (18, 30 months) who helped with those who did not help on two tasks (instrumental helping; empathic helping). More than half of children failed to help on one or both tasks. Nonhelpers engaged in more hypothesis testing on the instrumental helping task, but more security-seeking, wariness, and playing on the empathic helping task. Across tasks, children who tended to engage in nonhelping behaviors associated with negative emotional arousal also tended to seek comfort from a parent. In contrast, children who tended to play instead of helping were less likely to exhibit negative emotional arousal or hypothesis testing, suggesting a focus on their own interests. Parents of 18-month-old nonhelpers on the instrumental task were less engaged in socializing prosocial behavior in their toddlers than were the parents of helpers. On the empathic helping task, 18-month-old nonhelpers had less mature self-other understanding than did helpers. By examining how the predominant reasons for failing to help vary with age and task, we gain a fuller perspective on the factors involved in the early development of prosocial behavior.Correspondence should be sent to

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“…These experiences may help infants appreciate the consequences of inequality, and thus account for their tendency to allocate enhanced attention to unfair outcomes. A critical test of this hypothesis would be to conduct sharing interventions with pre-sharing infants, which have been shown to lead to the onset of sharing [29], to see whether they also impact infants’ ability to both detect violations to fairness norms, and assign valence to the actors that perform them.…”

Section: Relations Between Fairness and Sharing: Why Are Fairness Conmentioning

confidence: 99%

The origins of infants’ fairness concerns and links to prosocial behavior

Sommerville

Enright

2018

Current Opinion in Psychology

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Concerns about fairness are central to mature moral judgments. We review research regarding the origins of a sensitivity to distributive fairness, and how it relates to early sharing. Infants' sensitivity to fairness appears to be commensurate with that of school-age children: infants notice violations to fairness norms and evaluate individuals based on their fair or unfair behavior. However, it may differ in other ways: there is no evidence that infants punish unfair individuals. Sharing behavior plays a role in both the developmental emergence of, and subsequent individual differences in, infants' fairness concerns. These results motivate novel questions, such whether infants can entertain other models of fairness, whether infants' socio-moral concerns hang together, and the relationship early fairness sensitivities and later fair behavior.

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Experience facilitates the emergence of sharing behavior among 7.5-month-old infants.

Cited by 18 publications

References 30 publications

Fairness informs social decision making in infancy

Fairness informs social decision making in infancy

“Help Yourself!” What Can Toddlers' Helping Failures Tell Us About the Development of Prosocial Behavior?

The origins of infants’ fairness concerns and links to prosocial behavior

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