Do infants expect others to be helpful?
Wooyeol Lee1, Eun Young Kim2, Hyun-Joo Song3
1Chungbuk National University, Cheongju, South Korea.
The British Journal of Developmental Psychology
|March 27, 2020
Summary
Seventeen-month-old infants expect competent individuals to help others achieve goals. This suggests early developing expectations of prosocial behavior in infants, even without social cues.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Infant Cognition
- Social Cognition
Background:
- Infants develop helping behaviors in their second year.
- Infants understand helping needs based on context and social group cues.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if 17-month-old infants expect competent agents to help incompetent ones.
- To determine if infants' prosocial expectations exist without linguistic or social group information.
Main Methods:
- Infants observed familiarization events with competent and incompetent agents.
- Test events involved the competent agent either helping or ignoring the incompetent agent.
- Infant looking times were measured to infer expectations.
Main Results:
- Infants looked longer at the ignoring event compared to the helping event.
- This indicates infants expected the competent agent to help.
Conclusions:
- By 17 months, infants expect competent agents to exhibit prosocial behavior.
- Infants form expectations of helpfulness even without explicit social information.
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