Babies understand complexities of social situations and make evaluations about what different individuals know about others in responding to a situation. This is the finding of a new paper in the journal Psychological Science from the laboratory of Yuyan Luo of the University of Missouri.



Dr Luo and graduate student You-jung Choi were interested in how infants would respond to a scenario where one character in a social situation did something bad to another character in the presence or absence of a ‘friend’. Choi and Luo point out that in a situation where an adult finds out that a friend has done something bad, their decision on how to subsequently treat that friend would be complex. There is also the possibility that you may never find out about the friend’s transgression, in which case your behaviour to that person would be expected to remain the same. The authors say: "For adults, the answers to these questions are probably complicated, depending on various factors such as the nature of the friendship and both parties' personalities. We wondered whether infants could handle complex social interactions such as these."



To attempt to answer these questions, the study authors investigated emergent theory-of-mind understanding, which is understanding about other people’s mental states, including intentions, perceptions, and beliefs, in a group of 13 month-old babies. They assessed how infants use social-evaluation skills to make sense of social interactions. In order to overcome the fact that babies cannot explain verbally what they expect to happen, the researchers used a technique called ‘looking time’ as a way of examining babies’ expectations. This works on the basis that when babies see something normal or expected, they find them relatively boring and look away quickly. However, they will spend longer looking at something unusual or unexpected.



For the study, the researchers recruited 48 babies and their parents. Each baby was brought into the lab and was shown a hand puppet show on small stage in front of them, while sitting on their parent’s lap. In the first instance, the babies were shown puppets A and B interacting together in a friendly manner. The babies were then presented with three different subsequent scenarios. In one, puppet B deliberately knocked down a third puppet C, witnessed by puppet A. In a second, puppet C was again deliberately knocked down by B, but this time puppet A did not see what happened. In the third scenario, C was accidentally knocked down in the presence of A.



The results of the study indicated that the babies responded differently to each scenario. Their ‘looking time’ suggested that in the scenario where A did not see B knock down C, the infants expected A and B to continue to interact in a friendly manner. They looked for longer if A shunned B in this scenario than if they continued to play in a friendly manner, suggesting that the babies did not expect A to change their behaviour if they did not witness the incident. However, where A did witness B knock down C, the infants seemed to expect A to change their attitude and ignore B. Thus if A continued to be friendly with B after the deliberate knocking down, the infants spent more time looking at the puppets, suggesting that this friendly interaction was an unexpected turn of events. Finally in the situation where C was accidentally knocked down, the infants seemed equally to accept that A could or could not continue to interact in a friendly way with B. Choi and Luo say: "This to us indicates infants have strong feelings about how people should deal with a character who hits others: even his or her acquaintance or 'friend' should do something about it."



Choi and Luo suggest that their results indicate that young children develop the skills to assess social situations and make relevant judgments very early. They plan to develop this research to investigate whether the infants have expectations about how the victim should be treated and whether they respond to positive, helping behaviour in making social evaluations.