Alia Martin

Beyond Good and Evil What Motivations Underlie Children’s Prosocial Behavior?

Researchers have proposed different accounts of the development of prosocial behavior in children. Some have argued that behaviors like helping and sharing must be learned and reinforced; others propose that children have an initially indiscriminate prosocial drive that declines and becomes more selective with age; and yet others contend that even children’s earliest prosocial behaviors share some strategic motivations with the prosociality of adults (e.g., reputation enhancement, social affiliation). We review empirical and observational research on children’s helping and sharing behaviors in the first 5 years of life, focusing on factors that have been found to influence these behaviors and on what these findings suggest about children’s prosocial motivations. We use the adult prosociality literature to highlight parallels and gaps in the literature on the development of prosocial behavior. We address how the evidence reviewed bears on central questions in the developmental psychology literature and propose that children’s prosocial behaviors may be driven by multiple motivations not easily captured by the idea of intrinsic or extrinsic motivation and may be selective quite early in life.

What Cognitive Representations Support Primate Theory of Mind

Much recent work has examined the evolutionary origins of human mental state representations. This work has yielded strikingly consistent results: primates show a sophisticated ability to track the current and past perceptions of others, but they fail to represent the beliefs of others. We offer a new account of the nuanced performance of primates in theory of mind (ToM) tasks. We argue that primates form awareness relations tracking the aspects of reality that other agents are aware of. We contend that these awareness relations allow primates to make accurate predictions in social situations, but that this capacity falls short of our human-like representational ToM. We end by explaining how this new account makes important new empirical predictions about primate ToM.

Do 6-month-olds understand that speech can communicate?

Adults and 12-month-old infants recognize that even unfamiliar speech can communicate information between third parties, suggesting that they can separate the communicative function of speech from its lexical content. But do infants recognize that speech can communicate due to their experience understanding and producing language, or do they appreciate that speech is communicative earlier, with little such experience? We examined whether 6-month-olds recognize that speech can communicate information about an object. Infants watched a Communicator selectively grasp one of two objects (target). During test, the Communicator could no longer reach the objects; she turned to a Recipient and produced speech (a nonsense word) or non-speech (coughing). Infants looked longer when the Recipient selected the non-target than the target object when the Communicator spoke but not when she coughed - unless the Recipient had previously witnessed the Communicators selective grasping of the target object. Our results suggest that at 6 months, with a receptive vocabulary of no more than a handful of commonly used words, infants possess some abstract understanding of the communicative function of speech. This understanding may provide an early mechanism for language and knowledge acquisition.

When Kids Know Better: Paternalistic Helping in 3-Year-Old Children

Helping others is often more complicated than fulfilling their requests, for instance, when an individual requests something that is not suited to achieving her or his ultimate goal. Are children indiscriminate helpers, responding to any object-directed action or request, or do their helping actions prioritize ultimate goals over specific requests? We examined how 3-year-olds would provide help to an experimenter whose verbal requests were incompatible with the tasks she was trying to accomplish, a situation in which the best way to help was to deny the request and provide an alternative. In Study 1, children were less likely to give the experimenter a requested object when it was dysfunctional and could not allow the experimenter to complete her task than when it was functional. In Study 2, we found that children did not simply prefer functional objects, as they were willing to give the experimenter requested objects regardless of their functionality when the task was to throw objects in the trash. In Study 3, children denied a request for a dysfunctional object when the task could only be achieved using a functional object, but not when the task could be achieved with either object. We also found in Study 3 that children proactively warned an experimenter attempting to use an object not suited to her goal. Our studies show that by at least age 3, children prioritize ultimate goals when helping others, rather than fulfilling any object request.

Social exchange styles: Measurement, validation, and application

Drawing on evolutionary psychology, social exchange styles were conceptualized in terms of two dimensions of individual differences in approaching exchange relationships: Benefit–seeking and cost–vigilance. In Study 1, a principal components analysis of the Social Exchange Styles Questionnaire (SESQ) in 156 undergraduates confirmed the presence of two dimensions that were very similar to the expected dimensions: Equitable alliance building (EAB) and vigilant alliance management (VAM). The SESQ scales showed good internal consistency and construct validity. Multiple regressions confirmed that social exchange styles were distinct from other personality variables. In Study 2, multilevel modelling conducted on 45 small work groups demonstrated that EAB positively predicted members’ subjective performance, while VAM positively predicted objective performance. Theoretical questions and future research directions are discussed. Copyright

Editorial: Variability and Individual Differences in Early Social Perception and Social Cognition

In this research topic, we showcase state-of-the-art research on the sources and meaning of variability and individual differences in early social perception and cognition. These papers demonstrate that such variability contributes to our understanding of early development, requires specific methodological toolboxes and skill sets to expand our developmental inventory, and relates to important abilities later in life.

Once a frog-lover, always a frog-lover?: Infants’ goal generalization is influenced by the nature of accompanying speech.

The ability to interpret choices as enduring preferences that generalize beyond the immediate situation gives adults a powerful means of predicting and explaining others’ behavior. How do infants come to recognize that current choices can be driven by generalizable preferences? Although infants can encode others’ actions in terms of goals (Woodward, 1998), there is evidence that 10-month-olds still fail to generalize goal information presented in one environment to an event sequence occurring in a new environment (Sommerville & Crane, 2009). Are there some circumstances in which infants interpret others’ goals as generalizable across environments? We investigate whether the vocalizations a person produces while selecting an object in one room influences infants’ generalization of the goal to a new room. Ten-month-olds did not spontaneously generalize the actor’s goal, but did generalize the actor’s goal when the actor initially accompanied her object selection with a statement of preference. Infants’ generalization was not driven by the attention-grabbing features of the statement or the mere use of language, as they did not generalize when the actor used matched nonspeech vocalizations or sung speech. Infants interpreted the goal as person-specific, as they did not generalize the choice to a new actor. We suggest that the referential specificity of accompanying speech vocalizations influences infants’ tendency to interpret a choice as personal rather than situational.