THURSDAY, Nov. 22 (HealthDay News) -- At 6 and 10 months old, babies are able to evaluate whether or not a person's actions towards others are helpful, and express a preference for helpful people, according to a letter published online Nov. 21 in Nature.
J. Kiley Hamlin, and colleagues at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., conducted experiments using reaching behavior and a violation of expectations paradigm in order to assess the preferences of 12 six-month-olds and 16 ten-month-olds.
In the experiment, infants were shown a wooden figure being helped or hindered by another figure while climbing a hill. When both the helping and hindering characters were put within reach, all of the 6-month-olds and 14 of the 10-month-olds reached out for the helper. A second experiment confirmed that the infants chose the helping character based on social behavior preferences rather than superficial perceptual preferences by interchanging characters as well as motion direction.
"Our findings indicate that humans engage in social evaluation far earlier in development than previously thought, and support the view that the capacity to evaluate individuals on the basis of their social interactions is universal and unlearned," the authors write. "This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action, and its early developmental emergence supports the view that social evaluation is a biological adaptation."
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