How do toddlers evaluate defensive actions toward third parties?

Abstract

Defensive behavior is a central aspect of social life and provides benefits to the self and others. Recent evidence reveals that infants evaluate third parties' prosocial and antisocial actions. Three experiments were carried out to assess toddlers' reactions to defensive and non-defensive events (N = 54). In two experiments, infants' looking times and manual choices provided converging evidence that 20-month-olds understand and evaluate defensive actions, by showing that they prefer the defensive puppet over the non-defensive puppet and that they reason on the bystander puppet's disposition. In the third experiment, toddlers rewarded the defensive puppet rather than the non-defensive puppet, revealing how their evaluations guided awarding behaviors of defensive actions toward the third party. The results support the developmental stability and provide evidence of a rich and well-organized prosociality that before the second year of life proves to be based on some moral principles and linked with a sophisticated psychological reasoning. The findings shed light on the claims that human capacities for the social evaluation of defensive behaviors toward third parties are rooted in evolved cooperative systems.

Is Defensive Behavior a Subtype of Prosocial Behaviors?

“…Furthermore, the understanding of negative emotional states and their causes could involve an intuitive, automatic, and emotion-based evaluation (Van de Vondervoort and Hamlin, 2016 ), before generating a motivation to defend a victim from an attacker by engaging in aggressive behaviors. In this perspective, defensive behaviors could be considered a subtype of prosocial behaviors that can be elicited by recognizing another's emotional distress in Dunfield's smodel (2014), but in this case, it is necessary to evaluate the attacker as dangerous and evil to expect a bystander to engage a defensive behavior with an active action against the aggressor (Geraci, 2020a ). Finally, defense behavior strongly inspires an evolutionary explanation of the emergence of a moral sense in terms of cooperation between our ancestors for their survival (Hamlin, 2013 ).…”

“…Finally, defense behavior strongly inspires an evolutionary explanation of the emergence of a moral sense in terms of cooperation between our ancestors for their survival (Hamlin, 2013 ). Future studies should investigate toddlers' active behavioral engagements in defending actions to better explain better the emergence of prosocial behaviors, the link between the toddlers' aggressive behaviors (Vaish et al, 2009 ), and expectations of defending actions in third-party contexts (Geraci, 2020a ).…”

“…Taken together, these findings demonstrated an early capacity to distinguish social roles in laboratory conditions using artificial stimuli, often computer-presented animations showing a negative interaction between two agents. When infants were presented with an animation showing a triadic relation, they expected the third agent to intervene (placing himself in the middle between the victim and aggressor; Kanakogi et al, 2017 ) or to defend with a harmful action against the aggressor (e.g., pushing away; Geraci, 2020a ). We distinguish defending behaviors from intervening behaviors only for different behavioral responses that are performed to stop aggressive interaction between two agents: the intervener stops the aggressive interaction with a less negative action against the aggressor, and the defender attacks the aggressor with a more negative action against the aggressor.…”

“…These results revealed that 10-month-olds understand the intention behind intervening to prevent a victim from being harmed. On third-party defensive behaviors, a recent study found that 20-month-olds tend to reward and prefer those who defend a victim from an aggressor over who does not defend, and expect a bystander to approach the defender puppet rather than the non-defender (Geraci, 2020a ). In Experiment 1, toddlers after seeing a puppy puppet played the role of victim, showed a preference for the defensive puppet over the non-defensive puppet, and also, they attributed the same preference to a bystander.…”

Toddlers' expectations of third‐party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression

“…These findings suggest that children were not interested in punishing the antisocial puppet, though this null result could depend on the type of punishment used in this study. Children seem to exhibit a strong and early tendency to punish through resource reduction (Geraci, 2020a(Geraci, , 2020bHamlin et al, 2011;Kenward & Östh, 2015;McAuliffe et al, 2015;Mendes et al, 2018;Meristo & Surian, 2013;Riedl et al, 2015) rather than through corporal third-party punishments (Meristo & Surian, 2014;Marshall et al, 2019). A potential objection to these findings may be concerned the effect of context that influences each individual's behavior and development throughout life (Berscheid, 1999;Reis et al, 2000), affecting the children and adults' factors that motivate prosocial actions (Eisenberg et al, 2016;Maner & Gailliot, 2007), and evaluations (Geraci, 2020a;Marshall, Wynn et al, 2020).…”