Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T06:40:02.319Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Toddlers map the word ‘good’ to helping agents, but not to fair distributors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

Laura FRANCHIN ,
Federica SAVAZZI ,
Isabel Cristina NEIRA-GUTIERREZ  and
Luca SURIAN
Laura FRANCHIN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Italy
Federica SAVAZZI
Affiliation:
IRCCS, Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi, ONLUS, Milano, Italy
Isabel Cristina NEIRA-GUTIERREZ
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Italy
Luca SURIAN
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Italy
*
*Corresponding author: Laura Franchin, Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Corso Bettini, 31, 38068 Rovereto (Trento), Italy. Tel: +390464808633; E-mail: laura.franchin@unitn.it
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective good at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. We investigated infants’ and toddlers’ knowledge of good in the domains of help and fairness. Participants at 20 and 30 months were shown computer animations involving helpful and hindering agents, or agents who performed fair or unfair distributions, and were asked to “pick the good one”. Toddlers at 30 months took good as referring to helping, but not to the fair agents. However, when asked “to pick one”, they choose the fair distributor. These findings suggest that by 30 months toddlers have started to map good to some socio-moral features, such as a helping disposition, but not to fairness in distributive actions.

Keywords

goodhelpfairnessmoral developmentinfancy
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 98 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baillargeon, R., Scott, R., He, Z., Sloane, S., Setoh, P., Jin, K., et al. (2015). Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy. In Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P. R. (Eds.), Borgida, E., & Bargh, J. A. (Assoc. Eds.), APA handbook of personality and social psychology: Vol. 1. Attitudes and social cognition (pp. 79–150). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/14341-003Google Scholar
Blake, P. R., McAuliffe, K., & Warneken, F. (2014). The developmental origins of fairness: the knowledge–behavior gap. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(11), 559–61. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2014.08.003Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Lightbown, P., & Hood, L. (1975). Structure and variation in child language. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 40, 1–79.Google Scholar
Bloom, P. (2002). How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT PressGoogle Scholar
Bloom, P. (2013). Just babies: the origins of good and evil. New York: Crown.Google Scholar
Boeri, M. (2004). Socrates, Aristotle, and the Stoics on the apparent and real good. Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 20, 109–41.Google Scholar
Burns, M. P., & Sommerville, J. A. (2014). “I pick you”: the impact of fairness and race on infants’ selection of social partners. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00093Google Scholar
DesChamps, T. D., Eason, A. E., & Sommerville, J. A. (2016). Infants associate praise and admonishment with fair and unfair individuals. Infancy, 21(4), 478–504. doi:10.1111/infa.12117Google Scholar
Dunfield, K. A., & Kuhlmeier, V. A. (2010). Intention-mediated selective helping in infancy. Psychological Science, 21(4), 523–7. doi:10.1177/0956797610364119Google Scholar
Enright, E. A., Gweon, H., & Sommerville, J. A. (2017). ‘To the victor go the spoils’: infants expect resources to align with dominance structures. Cognition, 164, 8–21. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.03.008Google Scholar
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Buchner, A., & Lang, A. (2009). Statistical power analyses using G* power 3.1: tests for correlation and regression analyses. Behavior Research Methods, 41(4), 1149–60.Google Scholar
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. J., & Pethick, S. J. (1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59(5), 1–185. doi:10.2307/1166093Google Scholar
Geraci, A., & Surian, L. (2011). The developmental roots of fairness: infants’ reactions to equal and unequal distributions of resources. Developmental Science, 14, 1012–20. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01048.xGoogle Scholar
Hamlin, K. (2013). Failed attempts to help and harm: intention versus outcome in preverbal infants’ social evaluations. Cognition, 128, 451–74. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.04.004Google Scholar
Hamlin, K. (2015). The case for social evaluation in preverbal infants: gazing towards one's goal drives infants’ preferences for helpers over hinderers in the hill paradigm. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1563. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01563Google Scholar
Hamlin, K., & Wynn, K. (2011). Young infants prefer prosocial to antisocial others. Cognitive Development, 26, 30–9. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2010.09.001Google Scholar
Hamlin, K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450, 557–9. doi:10.1038/nature06288Google Scholar
Hamlin, K., Wynn, K., Bloom, P., & Mahajan, N. (2011). How infants and toddlers react to antisocial others. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(50), 19931–6. doi:10.1073/pnas.1110306108Google Scholar
Hare, R. M. (1952). The language of morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Katz, J. J. (1964). Semantic theory and the meaning of ‘good’. Journal of Philosophy, 61(23), 739–66.Google Scholar
Kuhlmeier, V., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2003). Attribution of dispositional states by 12-month-olds. Psychological Science, 14(5), 402–8. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.01454Google Scholar
Lucca, K., Pospisil, J., & Sommerville, J. A. (2018). Fairness informs social decision making in infancy. PLoS ONE, 13(2), e0192848. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0192848Google Scholar
Margoni, F., & Surian, L. (2018). Infants’ evaluation of prosocial and antisocial agents: a meta-analysis. Developmental Psychology, 54(8), 1445–55. doi:10.1037/dev0000538Google Scholar
Meristo, M., Strid, K., & Surian, L. (2016). Preverbal infants’ ability to encode the outcome of distributive actions. Infancy, 21, 353–72. doi:10.1111/infa.12124Google Scholar
Meristo, M., & Surian, L. (2013). Do infants detect indirect reciprocity? Cognition, 129, 102–13. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.06.006Google Scholar
Meristo, M., & Surian, L. (2014). Infants distinguish antisocial actions directed towards fair and unfair agents. PLoS ONE 9(10), e110553. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110553Google Scholar
Mintz, T. H., & Gleitman, L. R. (2002). Adjectives really do modify nouns: the incremental and restricted nature of early adjective acquisition. Cognition, 84, 267–93. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00047-1Google Scholar
Nichols, S., & Mallon, R. (2006). Moral dilemmas and moral rules. Cognition, 100, 530–42. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.07.005Google Scholar
Schmidt, M. F. H., & Sommerville, J. A. (2011). Fairness expectations and altruistic sharing in 15-month-old human infants. PLoS ONE, 6, e23223. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023223Google Scholar
Sloane, S., Baillargeon, R., & Premack, D. (2012). Do infants have a sense of fairness? Psychological Science, 23, 196–204. doi:10.1177/0956797611422072Google Scholar
Snow, C. (1987). Language and the beginnings of moral understanding. In Kagan, J. & Lamb, S. (Eds.), The emergence of morality in young children (pp. 112–22). University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sommerville, J. A. (2018). Infants’ understanding of distributive fairness as a test case for identifying the extents and limits of infants’ sociomoral cognition and behavior. Child Development Perspectives, 12(3), 141–5. doi:10.1111/cdep.12283Google Scholar
Sommerville, J. A., Schmidt, M. F. H., Yun, J., & Burns, M. (2013). The development of fairness expectations and prosocial development in the second year of life. Infancy, 18, 40–66. doi:10.1111/j.1532-7078.2012.00129.xGoogle Scholar
Surian, L., & Franchin, L. (2017a). Toddlers selectively help fair agents. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 944. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00944Google Scholar
Surian, L., & Franchin, L. (2017b). Infants reason about deserving agents: a test with distributive actions. Cognitive Development, 44, 49–56.Google Scholar
Wright, J. C., & Bartsch, K. (2008). Portraits of early moral sensibility in two children's everyday conversations. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 54, 56–85. doi:10.1353/mpq.2008.0010Google Scholar
Ziv, T., & Sommerville, J. A. (2017). Developmental differences in infants’ fairness expectations from 6 to 15 months of age. Child Development, 88(6), 1930–51. doi:10.1111/cdev.12674Google Scholar