Complex Social Situations Can Be Determined By Babies

Babies are adorable, but don't let them fool you. These youngsters hold the ability to make sense of complex social situations, according to recent findings published in Psychological Science. 

"Our findings show that 13-month-olds can make sense of social situations using their understanding about others' minds and social evaluation skills," said psychological scientists and study authors You-jung Choi and Yuyan Luo of the University of Missouri, in a news release. "The research is innovative in that we show that infants are able to construe social situations from different participants' perspectives."

For the experiment, researchers brought 48 infants who were around 1 year old into the lab for their experiment. The infant sat on his or her parent's lap, facing a little stage where hand puppets would appear. Two puppets (A and B) appeared on the stage and clapped their hands or hopped around together, allowing the infants to familiarize themselves with the characters and learn that A and B are were friendly with each other.

Next, the infants were presented with a particular social scenario. In one, the infants saw a third puppet, C, approach and get deliberately knocked down by B, as A looked on from the side. In another scenario, B knocked down C, but A wasn't present. And in a third scenario, C was accidentally knocked down as A looked on.

The researchers looked to determine how the infants might respond to subsequent interactions presented between A and B, based on what they had seen. As infants can't give the researcher's an idea of what they'd expect, they studied, instead, how long they looked as a way to determine expectations. While things that are normal or relatively boring will not hold an infant's gaze for too long, things that are unusual or unexpected might capture their imagination for a bit more time.

Researchers analyzed the looking time data and found that the infants responded to the outcomes in the three scenarios differently. 

"This to us indicates infants have strong feelings about how people should deal with a character who hits others: even his or her acquaintance or 'friend' should do something about it," Choi and Luo concluded.

The findings showed that infants looking at the puppets spent more time when A was "friendly" to B, suggesting that they could keep track of what A knew and didn't know based on inferences about A's behavior. However, if A wasn't around to see the hit occur, the infants took longer looking when A shunned B than when A was friendly to B.

Researchers concluded that the study shows how young children are continuously developing skills that help them assess social situations and social judgments.

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