ArticlePloS one2012
Social evaluation or simple association? Simple associations may explain moral reasoning in infants.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 199 citations in OpenAlex.
- Infants help a non-human agent.PloS one · 2013Trial
- Tonkean macaques do not prefer the helper or the hinderer in the hill paradigm.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- An associative-learning account of how infants learn about causal action in animates and inanimates: A critical reexamination of four classic studies.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Rethinking Norm Psychology.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
- Third-party punishment by preverbal infants.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Infants' neural responses to helping and hindering scenarios.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Cortical Activation to Social and Mechanical Stimuli in the Infant Brain.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
- Do 15-month-old infants prefer helpers? A replication of HamlinRoyal Society open science · 2020Article
- Social evaluation and imitation of prosocial and antisocial agents in infants, children, and adults.PloS one · 2020Article
- Mapping the Specific Pathways to Early-Onset Mental Health Disorders: The "Watch Me Grow for REAL" Study Protocol.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Use of Repeated Within-Subject Measures to Assess Infants' Preference for Similar Others.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Do Dogs Prefer Helpers in an Infant-Based Social Evaluation Task?Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- The Development of Anthropomorphism in Interaction: Intersubjectivity, Imagination, and Theory of Mind.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Preschoolers Focus on Others' Intentions When Forming Sociomoral Judgments.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Stability of infants' preference for prosocial others: Implications for research based on single-choice paradigms.PloS one · 2017Article
- Dogs' recognition of human selfish and generous attitudes requires little but critical experience with people.PloS one · 2017Article
- An Eye on Animacy and Intention.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
- The Origin of Social Evaluation, Social Eavesdropping, Reputation Formation, Image Scoring or What You Will.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Review
- Measuring empathy for human and robot hand pain using electroencephalography.Scientific reports · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Are we born amoral or do we come into this world with a rudimentary moral compass? Hamlin and colleagues argue that at least one component of our moral system, the ability to evaluate other individuals as good or bad, is present from an early age. In their study, 6- and 10-month-old infants watched two social interactions - in one, infants observed the helper assist the climber achieve the goal of ascending a hill, while in the other, infants observed the hinderer prevent the climber from ascending the hill. When given a choice, the vast majority of infants picked the helper over the hinderer, suggesting that infants evaluated the helper as good and the hinderer as bad. Hamlin and colleagues concluded that the ability to evaluate individuals based on social interaction is innate. Here, we provide evidence that their findings reflect simple associations rather than social evaluations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.