Friend or foe? Early social evaluation of human interactions

PLoS One. 2014 Feb 19;9(2):e88612. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0088612. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

We report evidence that 29-month-old toddlers and 10-month-old preverbal infants discriminate between two agents: a pro-social agent, who performs a positive (comforting) action on a human patient and a negative (harmful) action on an inanimate object, and an anti-social agent, who does the converse. The evidence shows that they prefer the former to the latter even though the agents perform the same bodily movements. Given that humans can cause physical harm to their conspecifics, we discuss this finding in light of the likely adaptive value of the ability to detect harmful human agents.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Child, Preschool
  • Choice Behavior
  • Discrimination, Psychological*
  • Female
  • Friends*
  • Humans
  • Infant
  • Interpersonal Relations*
  • Male

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from the French Ministry of Research (Cognitique program), the EU FP6 (Neurocom), the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-09-BLAN-0327 SOCODEV) and grants from Région IIe-de-France. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.