Toddlers and infants expect individuals to refrain from helping an ingroup victim's aggressor

The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment

Meta-analytic evidence indicates that the quality of the attachment relationship that infants establish with their primary caregiver has enduring significance for socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. However, the mechanisms by which early attachment experiences contribute to subsequent development remain underspecified. According to attachment theory, early attachment experiences become embodied in the form of cognitive-affective representations, referred to as internal working models (IWMs), that guide future behavior. Little is known, however, about the cognitive architecture of IWMs in infancy. In this article, we discuss significant advances made in the field of infant cognitive development and propose that leveraging insights from this research has the potential to fundamentally shape our understanding of the cognitive architecture of attachment representations in infancy. We also propose that the integration of attachment research into cognitive research can shed light on the role of early experiences, individual differences, and stability and change in infant cognition, as well as open new routes of investigation in cognitive studies, which will further our understanding of human knowledge. We provide recommendations for future research throughout the article and conclude by using our collaborative research as an example.

Infants Infer Social Relationships Between Individuals Who Engage in Imitative Social Interactions

Infants are born into rich social networks and are faced with the challenge of learning about them. When infants observe social interactions, they make predictions about future behavior, but it is not clear whether these predictions are based on social dispositions, social relationships, or both. The current studies (N = 188, N = 90 males) address this question in 12-month-old infants and 16- to 18-month-old toddlers who observe social interactions involving imitation. In Studies 1 and 3, infants and toddlers expected that imitators, compared to non-imitators, would respond to their social partners' distress. Likewise, they expected the targets of imitation, compared to non-targets, to respond to their partner's distress. In Study 2, these expectations did not generalize to interactions with a new partner, providing evidence that infants learned about the relationships between individuals as opposed to their dispositions. In Study 3, infants did not make predictions about responses to laughter, suggesting that infants see imitation as indicative of a specific kind of social relationship. Together, these results provide evidence that imitative interactions support infants' and toddlers' learning about the social relationships connecting unknown individuals.

Infants' biased individuation of in-group members

Adults tend to construe members of their group as "unique individuals" more than members of other groups. This study investigated whether infants exhibit this tendency, even in regard to unfamiliar arbitrary groups. Ninety-six White 1-year-olds were assigned to an Ingroup, Outgroup, or No-Group condition, based on whether or not they shared two preferences (food and shirt color) with women appearing on video sequences. In the critical trial, infants saw two women (Ingroup, Outgroup, or No-Group) - one at a time - appearing from behind a curtain. The curtain opened to reveal only one woman. Infants in the Ingroup condition looked longer at this display than infants in the other two conditions. This suggests that infants in the Ingroup condition had a stronger expectation than those in the other two conditions that there would be two women behind the curtain. In other words, infants individuated in-group members more than out-group members.

Teenagers' but not young adults' beliefs about intrinsic interpersonal obligations for group members

Previous research has indicated that children perceive social category members as having intrinsic obligations toward each other, which shape their expectations for social interactions. However, it is unclear whether teenagers (aged 13 to 15) and young adults (aged 19 to 21) continue to hold such beliefs, given their increased experience with group dynamics and external social rules. To explore this question, three experiments were conducted with a total of 360 participants (N = 180 for each age group). Experiment 1 examined negative social interactions using different methods in two sub-experiments, while Experiment 2 focused on positive social interactions to examine whether participants viewed social category members as intrinsically obligated to avoid harming each other and to offer assistance. Results revealed that teenagers evaluated within-group harm and non-help as unacceptable, regardless of external rules, whereas they viewed between-group harm and non-help as both acceptable and unacceptable, depending on the presence of external rules. Conversely, young adults considered both within-group and between-group harm/non-help as more acceptable if an external rule permitted such behavior. These findings suggest that teenagers believe that members of a social category are intrinsically obligated to help and not harm each other, whereas young adults believe that individual social interactions are constrained mainly by external rules. That is, teenagers hold stronger beliefs than young adults about intrinsic interpersonal obligations to group members. Thus, in-group moral obligations and external rules contribute differently to the evaluation and interpretation of social interactions at different developmental stages.

Preverbal infants' reactions to third-party punishments and rewards delivered toward fair and unfair agents

Rewarding individuals who distribute resources fairly and punishing those who distribute resources unfairly may be very important actions for fostering cooperation. This study investigated whether 9-month-olds have some expectations concerning punishments and rewards that follow distributive actions. Infants were shown simple animations and were tested using the violation-of-expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when they saw a bystander delivering a corporal punishment to a 'fair distributor,' who distributed some windfall resources equally to the possible recipients, rather than to an 'unfair distributor,' who distributed the resources unequally. This pattern of looking times was reversed when, in Experiment 2, punishments were replaced with rewards. These findings suggest an early emergence of expectations about punishing and rewarding actions in third-party contexts, and they help to evaluate competing claims about the origins of a sense of fairness.

The sense of belonging reduces ingroup favoritism in children

Belonging is an important motive for intergroup behavior. Adults display pronounced ingroup favoritism when the sense of inclusion by an ingroup is decreased or threatened. The present study investigated whether ingroup belonging reduces ingroup favoritism in 6-year-old children in terms of costly sharing. Children were allocated to a novel group in a minimal-group paradigm. In two conditions, children played a brief ball-tossing game and were either included (ingroup-inclusion condition) or excluded (ingroup-exclusion condition) by their ingroup members. Children in a no-interaction condition did not have any interactions with the members of the ingroup. After this manipulation, we tested the extent to which children shared resources with ingroup and outgroup members. We found that children in the ingroup-exclusion and no-interaction conditions shared more resources with their ingroup member than their outgroup member, while children in the ingroup-inclusion condition shared equally with the ingroup and outgroup members. These results could inform interventions aimed at fostering positive intergroup relations.

Infants infer third-party social dominance relationships based on visual access to intergroup conflict

During a conflict, having a greater number of allies than the opposition can improve one's success in a conflict. However, allies must be aware that has a conflict has occurred, and this is often influenced by what they are able to see. Here, we explored whether infants' assessment of social dominance is influenced by whether or not social allies have visual access to an episode of intergroup conflict. In Experiment 1, 9-12-month-olds only expected an agent to be socially dominant if their allies were able to witness the conflict. Experiment 2 provided further support for this finding, as infants did not expect an agent from a numerically larger group to be socially dominant when allies were unable to witness the conflict. Together, these results suggest that infants do not simply use a heuristic in which "numerically larger groups are always more dominant". Importantly, infants are able to incorporate social allies' ability to witness a conflict when predicting social dominance between groups.

Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parent with unknown others

Infants are born into networks of individuals who are socially connected. How do infants begin learning which individuals are their own potential social partners? Using digitally edited videos, we showed 12-mo-old infants' social interactions between unknown individuals and their own parents. In studies 1 to 4, after their parent showed affiliation toward one puppet, infants expected that puppet to engage with them. In study 5, infants made the reverse inference; after a puppet engaged with them, the infants expected that puppet to respond to their parent. In each study, infants' inferences were specific to social interactions that involved their own parent as opposed to another infant's parent. Thus, infants combine observation of social interactions with knowledge of their preexisting relationship with their parent to discover which newly encountered individuals are potential social partners for themselves and their families.

Developmental antecedents of representing "group" behavior: A commentary on Pietraszewski's theory of groups

Central to Pietraszewski's theory is a set of group-constitutive roles within four triadic primitives. Although some data from the developmental and biological sciences support Pietraszewski's theory, other data raise questions about whether similar behavioral expectations hold across various ecological conditions and interactions. We discuss the potential for a broader set of conceptual primitives that support reasoning about groups.

Shared intentionality and the representation of groups; or, how to build a socially adept robot

Pietraszewski provides a compelling case that representations of certain interaction-types are the "cognitive primitives" that allow all tokens of group-in-conflict to be represented within the mind. Here, I argue that the folk concept GROUP encodes shared intentions and goals as more central than these interaction-types, and that providing a computational theory of social groups will be more difficult than Pietraszewski envisages.

Young Children’s Conceptualisations of Kindness: A Thematic Analysis

Although there is much interest in the development of prosocial behaviour in young children, and many interventions that attempt to cultivate kindness in children, there is a paucity of research exploring children’s lived experiences of kindness and including their voices. In this study, children’s understanding of kindness is approached through qualitative interviews using puppets. Interviews were conducted with 33 children aged 5-6 years in 3 schools in the United Kingdom. Through thematic analysis, 4 themes were developed: (a) doing things for others, (b) relating with others, (c) rules and values, and (d) kindness affects us. These themes are examined in light of current thinking on prosocial and sociomoral development, and several key insights are highlighted, including types of prosocial behaviour, social connection, kindness-by-omission and defending, in-group bias, universal kindness versus personal safety, self-image, and a desire to improve the condition of society. These findings have implications for future research on prosocial development and for the design of kindness-based interventions, as well as providing an ecologically valid method of inquiry for use with young children.

When Are Similar Individuals a Group? Early Reasoning About Similarity and In-Group Support

Beginning in infancy, children expect individuals in a group to care for and be loyal to in-group members. One prominent cue that children use to infer that individuals belong to the same group is similarity. Does any salient similarity among individuals elicit an expectation of in-group preference, or does contextual information modulate these expectations? In Experiments 1 and 2, 12-month-old infants expected in-group preference between two individuals who wore the same novel outfit, but they dismissed this similarity if one of the outfits was used to fulfill an instrumental purpose. In Experiment 3, 26-month-old toddlers expected in-group preference between two individuals who uttered the same novel labels, but they dismissed this similarity if the labels were used to convey incidental as opposed to categorical information about the individuals. Together, the results of these experiments (N = 96) provide converging evidence that from early in life, children possess a context-sensitive mechanism for determining whether similarities mark groups.

Early concepts of intimacy: Young humans use saliva sharing to infer close relationships

Across human societies, people form "thick" relationships characterized by strong attachments, obligations, and mutual responsiveness. People in thick relationships share food utensils, kiss, or engage in other distinctive interactions that involve sharing saliva. We found that children, toddlers, and infants infer that dyads who share saliva (as opposed to other positive social interactions) have a distinct relationship. Children expect saliva sharing to happen in nuclear families. Toddlers and infants expect that people who share saliva will respond to one another in distress. Parents confirm that saliva sharing is a valid cue of relationship thickness in their children's social environments. The ability to use distinctive interactions to infer categories of relationships thus emerges early in life, without explicit teaching; this enables young humans to rapidly identify close relationships, both within and beyond families.

Can 5-month-old infants consider the perspective of a novel eyeless agent? New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning

Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B from the agent. When object-B protruded above the screen, infants interpreted the agent's actions as revealing a preference for object-A over object-B. When object-B did not protrude above the screen, however, infants refrained from attributing such a preference: Consistent with mentalistic accounts, they reasoned that the agent's representation of the scene did not include object-B, and they used the agent's incomplete representation, non-egocentrically, to interpret its actions.

Toddlers draw broad negative inferences from wrongdoers' moral violations

By 2 y of age, children possess expectations about several different moral principles. Building on these results, we asked whether children who observed a wrongdoer violate a principle would draw negative inferences from this violation about how the wrongdoer was likely to behave in other contexts. In four experiments, 25-mo-old toddlers (n = 152) first saw a wrongdoer harm a protagonist. When toddlers judged the wrongdoer's behavior to violate the principle of ingroup support or harm avoidance, they did not find it unexpected if the wrongdoer next violated the principle of fairness by dividing resources unfairly between two other protagonists (Exps. 2 and 3), but they did find it unexpected if the wrongdoer next acted generously by giving another protagonist most of a resource to be shared between them (Exp. 4). When toddlers did not construe the wrongdoer's harmful behavior as a moral violation, these responses reversed: They found it unexpected if the wrongdoer next acted unfairly (Exp. 1) but not if the wrongdoer next acted generously (Exp. 4). Detecting a moral violation thus lowered toddlers' assessment of the wrongdoer's moral character and brought down their expectations concerning the likelihood that the wrongdoer would perform: 1) obligatory actions required by other principles and 2) supererogatory or virtuous actions not required by the principles. Together, these findings expand our understanding of how young children evaluate others' moral characters, and they reveal how these evaluations, in turn, enable children to form sophisticated expectations about others' behavior in new contexts.

Toddlers' expectations of third-party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression

Rewarding someone who defends the victim of an unjust aggression and punishing someone who chose not to defend her may be very important acts of reciprocation in social life. This study investigates whether 21-month-olds have some expectations concerning such punishing and rewarding actions. Infants were shown simple puppet shows and were tested using the violation-of-expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when they saw a bystander puppet punishing the puppet who defended the victim rather than the puppet who did not defend her. This pattern of looking times was reversed when the punishing action was replaced with a rewarding action (Experiment 2). These findings reveal early-emerging expectations about punitive and reward motivations in third-party contexts, and provide some support for theoretical claims about the hardwiring of the human mind for cooperation and prosociality.

Toddlers' expectations of corporal third-party punishments against the non-defender puppet

Recent research has demonstrated that toddlers expect individuals to approach and reward those who defend a victim from an aggressor rather than those who refuse to do so. This work focused on toddlers' expectations of corporal third-party punishments trought various actions, such as hitting with a stick or repelling someone who refused to defend a social partner following aggression. Using a violation of expectation paradigm (VoE), three experiments were carried out to investigate whether 21-month-olds expect others to apply different kinds of corporal punishments against the non-defender puppet (expected event) rather than the defender puppet (unexpected event), showing a bystander hitting with a stick (Experiment 1) or pushing strongly (Experiment 3) each of the two puppets. In both experiments, toddlers showed to be surprised whent the saw the bystander punish by hitting or pushing the defender puppet rather the non-defender puppet. In a control experiment displaying a non-social condition (Experiment 2), in which the victim puppets were replaced by two inert boxes, toddlers showed no expectation. These results uncovered that toddlers expect others to engage in different corporal punishments toward those who refuse to defend a social partner from an aggressor, by revealing that these expectations are not specific to a single type of punishment. The findings raise questions about the development of corporal third-party punishments, and have implications for the theory on ontogenetic processes underlying sociomoral development.

Action Generalization Across Group Members: Action Efficiency Matters

Actions are usually generalized among social group members. Importantly, the efficiency of an action with respect to achieving an external target determines action understanding, and it may have different degrees of social relevance to social groups. Thus, this study explored the role of action efficiency in action generalization. We used computer animations to simulate actions in social groups initiated by visual action cues or category labels, and we measured differences in response times between identifying actions that were and were not consistent with group members, without explicit requirements regarding generalization. It was found that in both visually introduced and explicitly labeled social groups, when the group members acted inefficiently toward the external object, perceivers identified group-consistent actions faster than group-inconsistent actions, indicating that the exemplars' common inefficient actions are generalized to the unknown ingroup member, accordingly facilitating the identification of expected consistent inefficient action (Experiment 1). As this effect was not present when removing social group cues, it was determined to be specific to social groups (Experiment 2). Importantly, such generalization was not observed when the identical action was deemed efficient toward the external object (Experiment 3) and was specific to the demonstration of the action being completed by multiple group members rather than being repeated twice by one group member, supporting the group-based inference and ruling out the possibility of the increased memorability of inefficient actions leading to more generalization relative to efficient actions (Experiment 4). Therefore, the efficiency of an action bounds the generalization of the action across social group members through a process that is spontaneous and implicit. This constrained action generalization may be due to inefficient actions being represented as culture-specific conventional forms.

Five-month-old infants attribute inferences based on general knowledge to agents

To make sense of others' actions, we generally consider what information is available to them. This information may come from different sources, including perception and inference. Like adults, young infants track what information agents can obtain through perception: If an agent directly observes an event, for example, young infants expect the agent to have information about it. However, no investigation has yet examined whether young infants also track what information agents can obtain through inference, by bringing to bear relevant general knowledge. Building on the finding that by 4 months of age most infants have acquired the physical rule that wide objects can fit into wide containers but not narrow containers, we asked whether 5-month-olds would expect an agent who was searching for a wide toy hidden in her absence to reach for a wide box as opposed to a narrow box. Infants looked significantly longer when the agent selected the narrow box, suggesting that they expected her (a) to share the physical knowledge that wide objects can fit only into wide containers and (b) to infer that the wide toy must be hidden in the wide box. Three additional conditions supported this interpretation. Together, these results cast doubt on two-system accounts of early psychological reasoning, which claim that infants' early-developing system is too inflexible and encapsulated to integrate inputs from other cognitive processes, such as physical reasoning. Instead, the results support one-system accounts and provide new evidence that young infants' burgeoning psychological-reasoning system is qualitatively similar to that of older children and adults.

Origins of homophily: Infants expect people with shared preferences to affiliate

Homophily structures human social networks: people tend to seek out or be attracted to those who share their preferences or values, and to generally expect social connections between similar people. Here, we probe the nature and extent of infants' homophilic thinking by asking whether infants can use information about other people's shared preferences in the absence of other socially relevant behaviors (e.g., their proximity or joint attention) to infer their affiliation. To do so, we present infants with scenarios in which two people either share a preference or have opposing preferences while varying (across studies) the degree to which those people engage in other socially relevant behaviors. We show that by 14 months of age, infants demonstrate clear inferences of homophily: they expect two people with a shared preference to be more likely to affiliate than two people without such similarity, even in the absence of other social behaviors that signal friendship. Although such cognition begins to emerge by 6-months, younger infants' inferences are bolstered by social behaviors that signal friendship. Thus, an abstract understanding that homophily guides third-party affiliation has its roots in the second year of life, and potentially earlier.

The power of allies: Infants' expectations of social obligations during intergroup conflict

Many species of animals form social allegiances to enhance survival. Across disciplines, researchers have suggested that allegiances form to facilitate within group cooperation and defend each other against rival groups. Here, we explore humans' reasoning about social allegiances and obligations beginning in infancy, long before they have experience with intergroup conflict. In Experiments 1 and 2, we demonstrate that infants (17-19 months, and 9-13 months, respectively) expect a social ally to intervene and provide aid during an episode of intergroup conflict. Experiment 3 conceptually replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2. Together, this set of experiments reveals that humans' understanding of social obligation and loyalty may be innate, and supported by infants' naïve sociology.

Tracking multiple perspectives: Spontaneous computation of what individuals in high entitative groups see

Perspective-taking ability is crucial for supporting social interactions. It has been widely suggested that the calculation of an individual's perspective is spontaneous. Nevertheless, people typically engage with more than one individual, and computing what individuals in a crowd see is important. The current study explored whether people spontaneously compute the perspectives of individuals displayed in a crowd. The classic visual perspective-taking task was adopted, but the picture of the room was presented with four human avatars facing two walls. The results showed that if the crowd of individuals was treated as a high entitative group, when none of the perspectives of the individuals contained the same number of discs as that from the perspective of the participant, the judgment of the participant's perspective was slower than when a proportion of the perspectives of the individuals displayed in the crowd were consistent with the participant's perspective, even if the perspectives of the multiple individuals in a crowd were not explicitly noticed. This altercentric intrusion effect was not present when the crowd had low entitativity. These findings were replicated by using different methods to operationalize group entitativity. Hence, this study demonstrates that spontaneously tracking the perspectives of individuals displayed in a crowd has a boundary condition and that people can spontaneously compute what individuals in high entitative groups see.

The neurodevelopment of social preferences in early childhood

Human social preferences are the product of gene-culture coevolution, and rely on predispositions that emerge early in development. These social preferences encompasse distinct motivations, mechanisms, and behaviors, that facilitate social cohesion and cooperation. Developmental social neuroscience critically contributes in elucidating the proximate mechanisms involved in social decision-making and prosociality, and their gradual maturation in interaction with the social and cultural environment.

Groups as moral boundaries: A developmental perspective

In this chapter we present the perspective that social groups serve as moral boundaries. Social groups establish the bounds within which people hold moral obligations toward one another. The belief that people are morally obligated toward fellow social group members, but not toward members of other groups, is an early-emerging feature of human cognition, arising out of domain-general processes in conceptual development. We review evidence that supports this account from the adult and child moral cognition literature, and we describe the developmental processes by which people come to view social groups as shaping moral obligation. We conclude with suggestions about how this account can inform the study of social cognitive development more broadly, as well as how it can be used to promote positive moral socialization.

First steps toward an understanding of procedural fairness

In four experiments, we tested whether 20-month-old infants are sensitive to violations of procedural impartiality. Participants were shown videos in which help was provided in two different ways. A main character provided help to two other agents either impartially, by helping them at the same time, or in a biased way, by helping one agent almost immediately while the other after a longer delay. Infants looked reliably longer at the biased than at the unbiased help scenarios despite the fact that in both scenarios help was provided to each beneficiary. This suggests that human infants can attend to departures from impartiality and, in their second year, they already show an initial understanding of procedural fairness.

Intuitive theories inform children's beliefs about intergroup obligation

In addition to emerging from children's direct experiences with collaborative partners and groups, children's beliefs about obligation also arise from a process of intuitive theory-building in early childhood. On this account, it is possible for at least some of children's beliefs to emerge in the absence of specific experiences where obligations are held among fellow members of a group “we.”

The Development of Social Categorization

Social categorization is a universal mechanism for making sense of a vast social world with roots in perceptual, conceptual, and social systems. These systems emerge strikingly early in life and undergo important developmental changes across childhood. The development of social categorization entails identifying which ways of classifying people are culturally meaningful, how these categories might be used to predict, explain, and evaluate the behavior of other people, and how one's own identity relates to these systems of categorization and representation. Social categorization can help children simplify and understand their social environment but has detrimental consequences in the forms of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Thus, understanding how social categorization develops is a central problem for the cognitive, social, and developmental sciences. This review details the multiple developmental processes that underlie this core psychological capacity.

Infants expect leaders to right wrongs

Anthropological and psychological research on direct third-party punishment suggests that adults expect the leaders of social groups to intervene in within-group transgressions. Here, we explored the developmental roots of this expectation. In violation-of-expectation experiments, we asked whether 17-mo-old infants (n = 120) would expect a leader to intervene when observing a within-group fairness transgression but would hold no particular expectation for intervention when a nonleader observed the same transgression. Infants watched a group of 3 bear puppets who served as the protagonist, wrongdoer, and victim. The protagonist brought in 2 toys for the other bears to share, but the wrongdoer seized both toys, leaving none for the victim. The protagonist then either took 1 toy away from the wrongdoer and gave it to the victim (intervention event) or approached each bear in turn without redistributing a toy (nonintervention event). Across conditions, the protagonist was either a leader (leader condition) or a nonleader equal in rank to the other bears (nonleader condition); across experiments, leadership was marked by either behavioral or physical cues. In both experiments, infants in the leader condition looked significantly longer if shown the nonintervention as opposed to the intervention event, suggesting that they expected the leader to intervene and rectify the wrongdoer's transgression. In contrast, infants in the nonleader condition looked equally at the events, suggesting that they held no particular expectation for intervention from the nonleader. By the second year of life, infants thus already ascribe unique responsibilities to leaders, including that of righting wrongs.