ISSN : 1229-0718
The current study examined whether 12- to 17-month-olds are sensitive to the positivity of helping behaviors in their social evaluations. In a violation-of-expectation (VOE) task, they were first familiarized with helping and neutral events. In the helping event, an agent helped a circle, whereas the circle had no interaction with another agent in the neutral event. The test phase consisted of four trials in which the circle approached either the helper or the neutral agent. In a choice task, the infants were asked to choose either the helper or the neutral agent. In the VOE task, the infants looked reliably longer at the neutral agent-approach than at the helper-approach event in the second pair of test trials, suggesting that they expected the circle to approach the helper. However, such a difference in looking times in the two test events was not observed in the first pair of test trials. In the choice task, they preferred the helper over the neutral agent. The current findings demonstrate that 12- to 17-month-olds distinguish helpers from neutral agents when they infer others’ preferences as well as when they generate their own preferences.
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