Helping and hindering guide infants’ expectations about future behavior

What inferences do infants make from people’s helping behavior? Two preregistered studies examined whether 14- & 15-month-old infants expect consistent helping behavior across different social contexts, and whether any such expectations are consistent with inferences about relationships or dispositions. Participants saw one individual help a target social partner move a boulder up a hill, and they saw another individual hinder the same target from reaching the top of the hill. We then tested infants’ expectations about which individual was more likely to provide help in the future by measuring how long they looked when both the helper and hinderer provided help in a new context. In Exp1, the target social partner in the new helping context was the same character that appeared in the familiarization events. In Exp 2, the target was a novel character. Infants looked longer when the hinderer, rather than the helper, provided help to the original target in the new context (Exp1). However, infants’ looking times did not differ between events when the target was novel (Exp2). The looking patterns between the two experiments were significantly different. Thus, infants use the pro- or antisocial nature of an individual’s past actions to generate expectations for future behavior, but do not generalize those expectations to new targets. Together, this suggests that infants primarily infer social relationships, rather than dispositions, from others’ helping behavior.