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Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike.

ABSTRACT: The short ontogenetic time courses of conformity and stereotyping, both evident in the preschool years, point to the possibility that a central component of human social cognition is an early developing expectation that social group members will engage in common behaviors. Across a series of experiments, we show that by 7 months of age preverbal infants differentiate between actions by individuals that are and are not consistent with the actions of their social group members. Infants responded to group-inconsistent actions only in a social context: they failed to distinguish the same behavioral differences when presented with collections of nonsocial agents or inanimate objects. These results suggest that infants expect social group membership and behavior to covary, before extensive intergroup experience or linguistic input. This expectation is consistent with the socially motivated imitation and stereotyping evident in toddlers and preschoolers, and may play a role in the early emergence of one or both of these aspects of social behavior and cognition.

SUBMITTER: Powell LJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3799333 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike.

Powell Lindsey J LJ Spelke Elizabeth S ES

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20130923 41

The short ontogenetic time courses of conformity and stereotyping, both evident in the preschool years, point to the possibility that a central component of human social cognition is an early developing expectation that social group members will engage in common behaviors. Across a series of experiments, we show that by 7 months of age preverbal infants differentiate between actions by individuals that are and are not consistent with the actions of their social group members. Infants responded t ...[more]

PMID: 24062446

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Project description:Infant sociability is generally conceived in terms of dyadic capacities and behaviors. Recently, quantitative evidence has been published to support arguments that infants achieve a criterion for groupness: the capacity to interact simultaneously with two others. Such studies equate this capacity with alternating dyadic acts to the two other members of an interacting trio. Here we propose a stricter threefold criterion for infant groupness, of which the crux is whether the social behavior of an infant at time B is shown to be influenced by what two or more group-members were previously doing at time A. We test the viability of this conceptualization: (a) through its justification of the novel laboratory procedure of studying infant sociability in infant-peer quartets (rather than trios); and, (b) in an analysis of a pilot study of gaze-behavior recorded in 5-min interactions among two quartets of infants aged 6-9 months. We call this a 'proof of concept' because our aim is to show that infants are capable of groupness, when groupness is conceptualized in a supra-dyadic way-not that all infants will manifest it, nor that all conditions will produce it, nor that it is commonplace in infants' everyday lives. We found that both quartets did achieve the minimum criterion of groupness that we propose: mutual gaze predicting coordinated gaze (where two babies, A and B, are looking at each other, and B is then looked at by C, and sometimes D) more strongly than the reverse. There was a significant absence of 'parallel mutual gaze,' where the four babies pair off. We conclude that, under specific conditions, preverbal infants can manifest supra-dyadic groupness. Infants' capacities to exhibit groupness by 9 months of age, and the paucity of parallel mutual gaze in our data, run counter to the assumption that infant sociability, when in groups, is always generated by a dyadic program. Our conceptualization and demonstration of groupness in 8-month-olds thus opens a host of empirical, theoretical, and practical questions about the sociability and care of young babies.

Dataset Information

Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike.

Publications

Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike.

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