Eleven-Month-Old Infants Preferentially Look at Helpers But Do Not Reliably Incorporate Inconsistency Into Their Evaluations

Adults quickly form character impressions from their observations of others’ behavior and sometimes manage to do so even when an agent’s behaviors are inconsistent. Developmental psychology has provided some evidence that infants, like adults, may form impressions based on prosocial and antisocial acts: They prefer those who behave prosocially versus antisocially toward third parties. That said, previous work suggests that infants find it difficult to evaluate characters’ whose behaviors are inconsistent. The present, preregistered experiments further explored this phenomenon in an older age group (11-month-olds; N = 189) using an online format and presenting infants with giving versus taking, a different type of prosocial versus antisocial action than in previous work. In a preliminary experiment, we successfully replicated the finding that infants prefer looking to helpful givers over unhelpful takers when actors behave consistently and when each actor performed 4 actions. We then used the same online testing methods to examine infants’ evaluations of inconsistent actors. In Experiment 1, infants appeared able to evaluate inconsistent actors, preferring more versus less prosocial actors when their inconsistent act occurred last in a series of 5 acts; however, they did not appear to find the behavioral inconsistency unexpected, suggesting they may have failed to notice it. In Experiment 2, we adjusted the order of inconsistent acts and put the inconsistent act first, and attempted to conceptually replicate the findings of Experiment 1. Here, infants did not prefer more prosocial actors. Together with past work, these findings suggest that while infants prefer agents whose actions are consistently prosocial versus antisocial, they do not reliably incorporate behavioral inconsistency into their social evaluations.