File Drawer Report: Infants’ Expectations for Mutual Affiliates

Past work found that infants expect affiliated social agents to preferentially support one another. For example, characters who imitate the actions of a specific social partner are more likely, compared to a non-imitator, to help that social partner in the future. Infants’ expectations appear to be based on inferences of specific relationships, as they do not generalize to new social targets. Here we ask, however, if infants will extend expectations of support to the friend of a friend. We investigated whether infants could use their observations of two social agents’ positive social imitation interactions with the same target to make a transitive inference that the mutual affiliates were likely to be affiliated themselves. We did not find any evidence that infants used these observations to infer that mutual affiliates were more likely to be affiliated themselves.