Keeping friends in mind: Development of friendship concepts in early childhood

Afshordi, Narges; Liberman, Zoe

doi:10.1111/sode.12493

Cited by 20 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 68 publications

(136 reference statements)

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“…The idea that social relationships revolve around caring about one another's welfare is not new (Afshordi & Liberman, 2021;Baumeister & Leary, 1995;Delton & Robertson, 2016;Rhodes, 2013;Trivers, 1971). My goal here was to argue that at the very beginning of human life, infants not only desire relationships with people who care about them but also primarily understand affiliation in terms of this dimension.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Children use patterns of prosocial behavior to identify relationships (Afshordi, 2019;Liberman & Shaw, 2017, 2019 and use relationships to predict biased or obligatory prosociality (e.g., Mammen et al, 2021;Olson & Spelke, 2008;Rhodes, 2012). This suggests that, like infants, children see utility adoption as a core component of affiliation (Afshordi & Liberman, 2021). This concept may also continue to affect social preferences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Adopted Utility Calculus: Origins of a Concept of Social Affiliation

Powell

2022

Perspect Psychol Sci

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To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: Humans need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that the initial concept of social affiliation, available in infancy, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in intuitive psychology, as formalized in the naive-utility-calculus model. A concept of affiliation based on interpersonal utility adoption can account for findings from studies of infants’ reasoning about imitation, similarity, helpful and fair individuals, “ritual” behaviors, and social groups without the need for additional innate mechanisms such as a coalitional psychology, moral sense, or general preference for similar others. I identify further tests of this proposal and also discuss how it is likely to be relevant to social reasoning and learning across the life span.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adopted Utility Calculus: Origins of a Concept of Social Affiliation

Powell

2022

Perspect Psychol Sci

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“…Adding an “unknown” condition involving a face‐to‐face interaction with an unknown child from the same school (e.g., Lenz & Paulus, 2021), as well as measuring empathy for each recipient separately, might be good ways to assess how much self‐control, reciprocity, and/or reputation and empathy are interrelated. Finally, since children's friendship has been widely studied in the literature, including more diverse categories of recipients that vary in terms of social closeness with the participant is important to consider in future studies (Afshordi & Liberman, 2021; Barragan‐Jason et al, 2021; Engelmann et al, 2019; Grueneisen & Warneken, 2022; Lenz & Paulus, 2021; Marshall et al, 2020; Moore, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self‐control is negatively linked to prosociality in young children

Barragan‐Jason

Hopfensitz

2022

Behavioral Decision Making

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Human prosociality is a valuable but also deeply puzzling trait. While several studies suggest that prosociality is an impulsive behavior, others argue that self‐control is necessary to develop prosocial behaviors. Yet, prosociality and self‐control in children have rarely been studied jointly. Here, we measured self‐control (i.e., delay‐of‐gratification) and prosociality (i.e., giving in a dictator game) in 250 4‐ to 6‐year‐old French schoolchildren. Contrary to previous studies, we found a negative relationship between waiting in the delay‐of‐gratification task and giving in the dictator game. The effect was especially pronounced when the partner in the dictator game was unknown compared with giving in a dictator game where the partner was a friend. Our results suggest that self‐control is not always necessary to act prosocially. Future studies investigating whether and how such pattern develops across the lifespan and across cultures are warranted.

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“…Here we refer to the general class of positively affiliated individuals as “friends” (though see the Discussion for consideration of more specific relationship types). Concepts of prosocial relationships entail that friends adopt concern for one another's goals and welfare (Afshordi & Liberman, 2021; Powell, 2022; Rhodes, 2013). In other words, if two agents are friends, each one is expected to desire that the other experiences rewarding outcomes rather than failure or harm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants expect friends, but not rivals, to be happy for each other when they succeed

Smith-Flores

Herrera-Guevara

Powell

2023

Developmental Science

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A friend telling you good news earns them a smile while witnessing a rival win an award may make you wrinkle your nose. Emotions arise not just from people's own circumstances, but also from the experiences of friends and rivals. Across three moderated, online looking time studies, we asked if human infants hold expectations about others’ vicarious emotions and if they expect those emotions to be guided by social relationships. Ten‐ and 11‐month‐old infants (N = 154) expected an observer to be happy rather than sad when the observer watched a friend successfully jump over a wall; infants looked longer at the sad response compared to the happy response. In contrast, infants did not expect the observer to be happy when the friend failed, nor when a different, rival jumper succeeded; infants’ looking times to the two emotion responses in these conditions were not reliably different. These results suggest that infants are able to integrate knowledge across social contexts to guide expectations about vicarious emotional responses. Here infants connected an understanding of agents’ goals and their outcomes with knowledge of social relationships to infer an emotion response. Biased concern for friends but not adversaries is not just a descriptive feature of human relationships, but an expectation about the social world present from early in development. Further, the successful integration of these information types welcomes the possibility that infants can jointly reason about goals, emotions, and social relationships under an intuitive theory of psychology.RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 11‐month‐old infants use knowledge of relationships to make inferences about others’ vicarious emotions. In Experiment 1 infants expected an observer to respond happily to a friend's success but not their failure. Experiments 2 and 3 varied the relationship between the observer and actor and found that infants’ expectation of vicarious happiness is strongest for positive relationships and absent for negative relationships. The results may reflect an intuitive psychology in which infants expect friends to adopt concern for one another's goals and to thus experience one another's successes as rewarding.

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Keeping friends in mind: Development of friendship concepts in early childhood

Cited by 20 publications

References 68 publications

Adopted Utility Calculus: Origins of a Concept of Social Affiliation

Adopted Utility Calculus: Origins of a Concept of Social Affiliation

Self‐control is negatively linked to prosociality in young children

Infants expect friends, but not rivals, to be happy for each other when they succeed

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