Abstract
Healthy emotional development provides a foundation for the development of prosocial motives and their subsequent behaviors, especially those emotions specifically related to empathic responding. Previous research has demonstrated a preference for individuals who behave prosocially, as opposed to antisocially, in infants as young as 3 months of age (Hamlin et al., 2010). It has also been suggested that by 18 months of age infants may be evaluating the equitable and inequitable distributive actions of others as being either prosocial or antisocial behaviors, respectively (Geraci & Surian, 2011). This previous work has focused exclusively on the agents of the distributive actions. The purpose of the current study is to focus on the recipients of those actions, i.e., to determine if infants engage in social evaluations directed toward the individuals who are on the receiving end of prosocial and antisocial distributive behaviors. Specifically, this study assesses infant responses toward receivers that have been treated antisocially to determine if infants are displaying an empathically charged response toward individuals affected by antisocial actions.
Highlights
Throughout development, infants and young children will encounter many situations that will require them to engage in social evaluation and reasoning, some of it complex
While previous research (Geraci & Surian, 2011) has found that infants of similar age to our participants engage in social evaluation toward an acting distributing agent, the present study focused on the social evaluation of passive receiving agents
When infants grasped one of the two receivers, a greater number of infants chose the rich receiver more often. As these findings were weak, relative to those previously discussed that provided a basis for this study, it does not provide substantial evidence that infants are being motivated by social evaluation to the poor receiver over the rich and rather indicates that evaluating a passive receiving agent may be fundamentally different from evaluations of an acting distributing agent
Summary
Throughout development, infants and young children will encounter many situations that will require them to engage in social evaluation and reasoning, some of it complex. Research supporting the findings of Geraci and Surian (2011) that infants in their second year can make such evaluations was carried out by Schmidt and Sommerville (2011) They found that 15-month-old infants looked longer at the outcome of an event depicting a distribution of unequal resources compared to when the infants observed an event in which resources were distributed across agents. Geraci and Surian found 18-month-olds to look longer—i.e., prefer—distributors who distribute equal amounts, while Schmidt and Sommerville found 15-month-olds to look longer at events showing unequal distribution, presumably because such events violated the infants’ expectations of equal distribution These outcomes suggest older infants expect equal distribution of resources and prefer distributors who do so. We hypothesized that when the receiving agents were inanimate the infant would show a greater preference for the receiving object to which was distributed a greater number of resources, thereby indicating that infants may be aligning with greater resource amounts when empathy is seemingly removed from the situation
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