Abstract
Early on infants seem to represent social actions of others from a moral perspective, evaluating others’ dispositions as “mean” or “nice.” The current research examined whether or not 11-month-old infants represent these sociomoral dispositions as deep and identity-determining properties using an object individuation task. Infants were shown two identical looking characters emerging sequentially from behind a screen and engaging in two different sociomoral actions. By using a looking-time paradigm the results show an interaction effect between the baseline and test trials, showing that infants seem to represent two different characters involved in the event, disregarding their same external appearance. This effect was mainly apparent when infants witnessed a negative event first in test trials. Experiments 2 and 3 control for alternative explanations. In Experiment 2 infants failed to individuate two characters when they are shown two identical looking puppets. In Experiment 3 infants fail to represent two characters when social information was taken away from the show. We discuss the possibility that by the end of the first year of life infants might represent sociomoral dispositions as diagnostic of individual identity.
Highlights
Moral judgment is a fundamental part of our daily social life
This evidence of object individuation is striking since previous studies have demonstrated that infants at this age require the presence of contrasting physical properties in order to represent objects as separate individuals (e.g., Xu and Carey, 1996; Van de Walle et al, 2000)
The current study suggests that infants will infer the presence of two individuals if they observe two different sociomoral actions, despite both puppets involved in the helping-hindering interactions displaying the same surface properties
Summary
Moral judgment is a fundamental part of our daily social life. Our constant evaluation of others’ behavior – categorizing others’ actions as nice or mean, helpful or unhelpful – comprises a moral sense that is a continuous influence on the ways we choose to interact with others (Tomasello, 2016). Infants’ evaluations are dependent on the goals (Hamlin and Baron, 2014), intentions (Hamlin, 2013a), and knowledge the characters possess when interacting with one another (Hamlin et al, 2013b), suggesting that these abilities comprise the essential foundation for a later-developing system of moral judgment (Wynn, 2008) Such a Individuation by Sociomoral Disposition core capacity for social evaluation may be the result of an evolutionary adaptation to deal with other people in cooperative contexts (Tomasello and Vaish, 2013)
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