Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Abstract

IntroductionConsider the following scene: A man wearing a backpack is pacing leisurely back and forth in a large airport room. As he strolls, he occasionally crosses his arms, twirls the dangling straps of his backpack, or stuffs his hands in his pant pockets. At one point, he sits down, takes off his backpack, and removes from it a bag filled with assorted gummy bears; as he peers intently inside the bag, he selects and eats, one at a time, five red gummy bears.As adults, we would have no difficulty interpreting the man's actions. We might view his initial actions-pacing, crossing his arms, and so on-as intentional (as opposed to accidental) though not as directed toward any particular goal. In contrast, we might perceive his subsequent actions-removing the bag of gummy bears from his backpack and eating five red ones in succession-as both intentional and goal-directed. In analyzing these actions, we might build an explanation that attributes to the man a causally coherent set of motivational and epistemic mental states: He wants to eat gummy bears, he is particularly fond of red ones, and so when he spies one in the bag, he removes it and eats it.Next, consider a new scene: As the man is happily chewing on red gummy bears, he notices a second man approaching who is carrying two heavy suitcases. At this point, our scene might unfold according to different scenarios. In one, the first man greets the second man, offers to carry one of the suitcases, and holds out his bag of gummy bears. In another scenario, the first man continues to watch the second man but makes no move to approach him. In yet another scenario, the first man sticks out a leg to trip the second man, causing him to fall heavily.As adults, we would interpret and evaluate the first man's actions in the three scenarios very differently. In the first scenario, we might infer that the two men have a social group in common: They might be friends, coworkers, or relatives, for example. In the second scenario, we 3 would conclude that the two men are strangers. In both the first and second scenarios, we would view the first man's behavior as acceptable: Offering help and sharing food are expected prosocial behaviors in interactions with ingroup, but not outgroup, individuals. In contrast, the first man's behavior in the third scenario would seem to us beyond the pale: Unprovoked harmful actions, even against outgroup individuals, are generally viewed as unacceptable. We would categorize the first man as an antisocial lout, and we might file away distinctive characteristics as possible markers of a social group to be avoided in the future.Our discussion of the two scenes above illustrates the rich analyses that adults spontaneously engage in when watching others act. What are the developmental origins of these interpretations? Over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of research on social cognition in infancy. This research can be roughly organized into two sets of questions that map neatly onto the two scenes above. First, when watching an agen...

Surprise! 20-month-old infants understand the emotional consequences of false beliefs

“…Considerable evidence indicates that by the second year of life, infants can attribute to agents a rich array of internal states including goals, dispositions, knowledge, and beliefs (for a review, see Baillargeon et al, 2015). If infants can attribute these internal states to agents, then it seems plausible that they can attribute internal emotional states to agents as well.…”

“…Recently, however, researchers have developed a number of alternative paradigms for assessing false-belief understanding in much younger children (e.g., Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009;Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010;Luo, 2011;Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;Scott, Baillargeon, Song, & Leslie, 2010;Southgate, Senju, & Csibra, 2007). Positive results have now been obtained with infants aged 8 to 25 months using a variety of response measures (for reviews, see Baillargeon et al, 2015;Scott, Roby, & Smith, in press), leading many investigators to conclude that the capacity to attribute false belief to others emerges by at least the end of the first year of life (e.g., Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010;Barrett et al, 2013;Buttelmann et al, 2009;Carruthers, 2013;Kovács et al, 2010;Luo, 2011;Scott, in press;Southgate et al, 2007;Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007).…”

What is the Relationship Between “Personality” and “Social” Psychologies? Network, Community, and Whole Text Analyses of The Structure of Contemporary Scholarship

“…Applying this metric to chapters of the handbook reveals the limitations of the simple model. For example, the Evolutionary Social Cognition chapter shares only one common reference with the chapter, in the same section of the same volume, on Psychological and Sociomoral Reasoning in Infancy (Baillargeon et al, 2014), but eight references with the chapter, in a different section of a different volume, on Evolutionary Personality Psychology (Buss & Penke, 2015). The inadequacy of a simple hierarchy for describing the relative proximity of chapters in the Handbook is not a failure of the editors, but is instead a reflection of the multidimensional structure of social/ personality psychology.…”

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“…As demonstrated through a variety of techniques such as preferential looking-time, violation-of-expectation tasks, and behavioral observations, children under 2 y of age appear to both act prosocially and prefer prosocial to antisocial others (4). For example, 3-mo-olds preferentially attend to a character who previously acted in a prosocial manner toward another (5), suggesting a bias toward those that "do good things."…”