Trial reportPloS one2013
Infants help a non-human agent.
Trial report in PloS one, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- 'Ripple' effect on infant zBMI trajectory of an internet-based weight loss program for low-income postpartum women.Pediatric obesity · 2019Trial
- Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2021Article
- Is young children's helping affected by helpees' need? Preschoolers, but not infants selectively help needy others.Psychological research · 2020Article
- Response: Commentary: A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharing, and comforting subtypes.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Commentary: A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharing, and comforting subtypes.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
- Psychological and neural correlates of the emergence of morality in toddlers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- "Does he need help or can he help himself?" Preschool children's expectations about others' instrumental helping versus self-helping.Frontiers in psychology · 2014Article
- Direct cost does not impact on young children's spontaneous helping behavior.Frontiers in psychology · 2014Article
- The early origins of human charity: developmental changes in preschoolers' sharing with poor and wealthy individuals.Frontiers in psychology · 2014Article
- Helping as an early indicator of a theory of mind: Mentalism or Teleology?Cognitive developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Young children can be motivated to help adults by sympathetic concern based upon empathy, but the underlying mechanisms are unknown. One account of empathy-based sympathetic helping in adults states that it arises due to direct-matching mirror-system mechanisms which allow the observer to vicariously experience the situation of the individual in need of help. This mechanism could not account for helping of a geometric-shape agent lacking human-isomorphic body-parts. Here 17-month-olds observed a ball-shaped non-human agent trying to reach a goal but failing because it was blocked by a barrier. Infants helped the agent by lifting it over the barrier. They performed this action less frequently in a control condition in which the barrier could not be construed as blocking the agent. Direct matching is therefore not required for motivating helping in infants, indicating that at least some of our early helpful tendencies do not depend on human-specific mechanisms. Empathy-based mechanisms that do not require direct-matching provide one plausible basis for the observed helping. A second possibility is that rather than being based on empathy, the observed helping occurred as a result of a goal-contagion process in which the infants were primed with the unfulfilled goal.
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.