The Role of Goal Understanding in Infants’ Evaluation of Helping and Hindering Actions

• In Event: Mental State Understanding and Moral Development

Abstract

A growing literature suggests that infants evaluate others based on their prosocial/antisocial behaviors, preferring characters who help versus hinder others (for review, see Ting et al., 2020). However, there has been considerable debate about whether infants’ responses in these studies are based on perceptual features of the displays or evaluations of the social value of others’ acts (Scarf et al., 2012a, 2012b; cf. Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2012). The current study used eye tracking to investigate the nature of infants’ responses in these studies by examining 5-month-old infants’ real-time looking behaviors during helping/hindering events, and exploring how individual infants’ looking behaviors correlate with preferences for a helper agent. Given past work suggesting the ability to perceive the climber’s goal is critical to infants’ group-level helper preferences (Hamlin, 2015), we are particularly interested whether infants who attend more to the target of a climber’s goal demonstrate stronger preferences for helpers. Thirty-four 5-month-old infants were familiarized to 2 blocks of 6 videos depicting helping and hindering events. In these videos, a climber repeatedly tried but failed to reach the top of a steep hill. On his third attempt, the climber was consistently helped (bumped up the hill) by a prosocial character or hindered (bumped down the hill) by an antisocial character. Past research using this paradigm has found that, after being habituated to these helping/hindering events, infants preferentially reach to and look at helpers over hinderers by 6 and 3 months of age, respectively (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007, 2010), suggesting that infants more positively evaluate helpful characters. In the current study, we assessed infants’ looking behaviors during different phases of the helping/hindering scenarios using an eye-tracker, in order to explore how they processed different aspects of the sociomoral scenes. Infants’ social preferences towards the helper were assessed following each block of helping/hindering videos by proportional looking time to the helper versus hinderer in an image of the characters side-by-side. The design and analysis plan of the study were preregistered on Open Science Framework. Results showed that, at the group level, infants looked longer at the helper after viewing 12 (but not after viewing 6) helping and hindering events, suggesting that sufficient exposure to helper/hinderer’s action is important for 5-month-old infants’ social preferences towards the helper. In addition, individual infants’ preferences for the helper were predicted by their looking behaviors, particularly those suggestive of an understanding of the climber’s unfulfilled goal. Specifically, more attention toward the climber’s goal (the hilltop) and more back-and-forth fixations between the climber and the hilltop during the climber’s ascent was positively related to looking toward the helper during preference trials. Further, the group of infants who showed hilltop looking behaviors during the climber’s ascent reliably preferred the helper to the hinderer across (the first and second) preference trials. Taken together, these results suggest that understanding the goal of the climber is important for the formation of infants’ social evaluations, and support the hypothesis that infants’ responses to prosocial and antisocial scenarios are rooted in social processing.

Authors

• Enda Tan, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• J. Kiley Hamlin, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Non-Presenting Author