Abstract
Human societies are organised around cooperative interactions, the origins and development of which have become a timely topic. In this study, we investigated the development of indirect reciprocity in 18–24-month-old toddlers, and infants aged 6 months, on a two-phase sharing task with non-familiar individuals. In the first phase, we observed whether infants and toddlers differentiated and manifested a preference toward an individual altruistically sharing or acting selfishly. In the second phase, infants and toddlers interacted with the same prosocial and antisocial individuals seen in the first phase, and we observed whether they were willing to share with one of the two. Indirect reciprocity was assessed as the match between the preferences for the prosocial individual in phase one, and the first-person sharing in the second phase. Evidence showed that toddlers, but not infants, indirectly reciprocated the prosocial individual, suggesting that understanding of such a complex behaviour as indirect reciprocity may require prolonged experience in order to emerge.
Highlights
The evolution of cooperation and altruism among non genetically related individuals represents one of the most astonishing and complex human behaviours
Among the different mechanisms that might promote cooperation (e.g., kin selection, direct reciprocity, see Nowak (2006) for a review), indirect reciprocity is the most intriguing because it accounts for behaviours, in which the donor does not receive anything in return, following the rule: if individual A helps B while individual C observes the interaction between A and B, C will be more willing to help A in the future (Boyd and Richerson, 1989; Nowak and Sigmund, 1998)
Irrespective of whether infants see puppets (Hamlin et al, 2007; 2011), cartoons (Geraci and Surian, 2011; Meristo and Surian, 2013; 2014) or humans (Dunfield et al, 2011; Schmidt and Sommerville, 2011) performing the prosocial or antisocial behaviour, they tend to prefer prosocial over antisocial behaviours
Summary
The evolution of cooperation and altruism among non genetically related individuals represents one of the most astonishing and complex human behaviours. The authors tested 5-month-old and 6-month-old infants, and found that while younger infants solely evaluate the positive or negative effect on the recipient (i.e., they always prefer the prosocial behaviour irrespective of whether the recipient previously acted prosocially or antisocially), by 8 months of age infants take in consideration the reputation of the recipient to decide whether the latter should be treated “good” or “bad”. These studies suggest that rudiments of indirect reciprocity can be observed in infancy, but the age at which it is observed may vary according to stimuli used
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