Soon to appear in Nature, as reported at CBC:

Babies can distinguish between people based on their actions toward a third party, U.S. researchers say.

"Infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual," the Yale University psychology researchers report in the edition of Nature to be published Thursday.

"The findings reported here constitute the first evidence that young infants' social preferences are influenced by others' behaviour towards unrelated third parties," they say. The findings show humans make social evaluations at a much younger age than previously thought."

The study was performed by the Yale Infant Cognition Center. You can see video of the "climber" used to display helpful or hindering action here. I always approach infant studies with a fair amount of skepticism. "Just what were they thinking?" isn't so easily answered as might be the question "Just what would I be thinking?" I haven't read the article yet, but, based on the video, I'm wondering whether the infants might not be reacting according to whether anticipated completion of a task/event initiated (starting to "climb" or roll up hill) is fulfilled or frustrated? Are blocks that successfully get to the top favored over those that start but fall back down (without any additional blocks)? What of blocks that begin with in the middle, as it were, without signaling a "goal" (just start climbing or descending)? I guess I need to know how the neutral figure was introduced.

In any case, was the infants' "judgment" based on concepts from psychology (blocks with eyes!), sociology (eye-laden blocks that interact!) or physics (patterns of block motion)? What if the blocks had no eyes?

Even babies make social judgments, study suggests | CBC

Social evaluation by preverbal infants. J. Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn & Paul Bloom. Nature 450, 557-559 (22 November 2007)

h/t to 3QD.

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