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Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions
We investigated whether and how infants link the domains of harm, help and fairness. Fourteen-month-old infants were familiarized with a character that either helped or hindered another agent's attempts to reach the top of a hill. Then, in the test phase they saw the helper or the hinderer carr...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137229/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30245655 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01649 |
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author | Surian, Luca Ueno, Mika Itakura, Shoji Meristo, Marek |
author_facet | Surian, Luca Ueno, Mika Itakura, Shoji Meristo, Marek |
author_sort | Surian, Luca |
collection | PubMed |
description | We investigated whether and how infants link the domains of harm, help and fairness. Fourteen-month-old infants were familiarized with a character that either helped or hindered another agent's attempts to reach the top of a hill. Then, in the test phase they saw the helper or the hinderer carrying out an equal or an unequal distribution toward two identical recipients. Infants who saw the helper performing an unequal distribution looked longer than those who saw the helper performing an equal distribution, whereas infants who saw the hinderer performing an unequal distribution looked equally long than those who saw the hinderer performing an equal distribution. These results suggest that infants linked the hindering actions to a diminished propensity for distributive fairness. This provides support for theories that posit an early emerging ability to attribute moral traits to agents and to generate socio-moral evaluations of their actions. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS - Infants expect agents that previously helped another agent to perform egalitarian distributions, but they do not generate such expectation about agents that previously hindered another agent. - This ability to link hindering and distributive actions is important because it may help the development of reasoning about agents' stable moral traits. - Results provide support for recent theories on early social evaluation skills and they constraint theories on the acquisition of moral competence. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6137229 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-61372292018-09-21 Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions Surian, Luca Ueno, Mika Itakura, Shoji Meristo, Marek Front Psychol Psychology We investigated whether and how infants link the domains of harm, help and fairness. Fourteen-month-old infants were familiarized with a character that either helped or hindered another agent's attempts to reach the top of a hill. Then, in the test phase they saw the helper or the hinderer carrying out an equal or an unequal distribution toward two identical recipients. Infants who saw the helper performing an unequal distribution looked longer than those who saw the helper performing an equal distribution, whereas infants who saw the hinderer performing an unequal distribution looked equally long than those who saw the hinderer performing an equal distribution. These results suggest that infants linked the hindering actions to a diminished propensity for distributive fairness. This provides support for theories that posit an early emerging ability to attribute moral traits to agents and to generate socio-moral evaluations of their actions. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS - Infants expect agents that previously helped another agent to perform egalitarian distributions, but they do not generate such expectation about agents that previously hindered another agent. - This ability to link hindering and distributive actions is important because it may help the development of reasoning about agents' stable moral traits. - Results provide support for recent theories on early social evaluation skills and they constraint theories on the acquisition of moral competence. Frontiers Media S.A. 2018-09-07 /pmc/articles/PMC6137229/ /pubmed/30245655 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01649 Text en Copyright © 2018 Surian, Ueno, Itakura and Meristo. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Surian, Luca Ueno, Mika Itakura, Shoji Meristo, Marek Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions |
title | Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions |
title_full | Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions |
title_fullStr | Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions |
title_full_unstemmed | Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions |
title_short | Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions |
title_sort | do infants attribute moral traits? fourteen-month-olds' expectations of fairness are affected by agents' antisocial actions |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137229/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30245655 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01649 |
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