Infants’ neural responses to helping and hindering scenarios

Tan, Enda; Hamlin, J. Kiley

doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101095

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(99 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A second possible interpretation of our findings is that the results reflect initial differences in baseline expectations across the two sub-domains: much work has found that infants have baseline expectations for fair over unfair behavior (Geraci and Surian, 2011;Schmidt and Sommerville, 2011;Sloane et al, 2012;Ziv and Sommerville, 2017;Sommerville and Enright, 2018), whereas no particular expectations for whether a given individual will be helpful or hindering (Hamlin et al, 2007;Fawcett and Liszkowski, 2012;Hamlin, 2013;Margoni and Surian, 2018;Tan and Hamlin, 2022). Although infants did not look significantly longer at the unfair distribution (versus fair) during familiarization in Experiment 1, as might be expected by prior work (Geraci and Surian, 2011;Schmidt and Sommerville, 2011;Sloane et al, 2012;Burns and Sommerville, 2014), infants' attention declined to the fair distribution across familiarization trials but not the unfair familiarization (whereas this was not true for either helping or hindering behavior during familiarization trials; in both cases, infants' attention declined significantly).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering

Gill

Sommerville

2023

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Across two experiments, we investigated whether infants use prior behavior to form expectations about future behavior within the moral domain, focusing on the sub-domains of fairness and help/harm. In Experiment 1, 14- to 27-month-old infants were familiarized to an agent who either helped or hindered another agent to obtain her goal. At test, infants saw the helper or hinderer perform either a fair or unfair distribution of resources to two recipients. Infants familiarized to helping looked longer to the unfair distribution than the fair distribution at test, whereas infants familiarized to hindering looked equally at both test events, suggesting that hindering led infants to suspend baseline expectations of fairness. In Experiment 2, infants saw these events in reverse. Following familiarization to fair behavior, infants looked equally to helping and hindering; in contrast, following familiarization to unfair behavior, infants looked significantly longer to helping than hindering on test, suggesting that prior unfair behavior led infants to expect the agent to hinder another agent’s goals. These results suggest that infants utilize prior information from one moral sub-domain to form expectations of how an individual will behave in another sub-domain, and that this tendency seems to manifest more strongly when infants initially see hindering and unfair distributions than when they see helping and fair distributions. Together, these findings provide evidence for consilience within the moral domain, starting by at least the second year of life.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering

Gill

Sommerville

2023

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Hamlin et al, 2007). Finally, in an EEG study both 6‐ month‐olds and 12‐month‐olds showed greater power in the social components N290 and P400 after viewing images of hinderers versus images of helpers, as though the brain responds more strongly to negative social agents than to positive ones (Tan & Hamlin, 2022b; see also Ito et al, 1998).…”

Section: Evidence For Infants' Sensitivity To Prosocial and Antisocia...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Core morality? Or merely core agents and social beings? A response to Spelke'swhat babies know

Hamlin

2023

Mind & Language

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Spelke's What babies know describes the remarkably sophisticated mental lives of infants through the theoretical framework of core knowledge. To Spelke, young infants possess six independent core domains, two of which allow them to reason about the social world: the core agent and the core social being systems. Critically, Spelke argues that these core systems fail to communicate prior to 10 months, resulting in an inability to understand social goals. In this commentary, I review evidence that, contrary to Spelke's claims, young infants show robust understanding of social goals and intentions, consistent with claims of an early emerging moral core.

show abstract

Belongingness as the Foundation of Social and Emotional Development: Focus on Black Infants, Toddlers, and Young Children

Bocknek,

Iruka,

Brophy-Herb

et al. 2024

WAIMH Handbook of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Infants’ neural responses to helping and hindering scenarios

Cited by 9 publications

References 55 publications

Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering

Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering

Core morality? Or merely core agents and social beings? A response to Spelke'swhat babies know

Belongingness as the Foundation of Social and Emotional Development: Focus on Black Infants, Toddlers, and Young Children

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About