ArticlePloS one2015
Probing the Strength of Infants' Preference for Helpers over Hinderers: Two Replication Attempts of Hamlin and Wynn (2011).
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 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
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Core Intuitions of Psychological Non-Contradiction: Infants Assume That Individual Agents Act and Communicate Coherently.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Eleven-Month-Old Infants Preferentially Look at Helpers But Do Not Reliably Evaluate Inconsistent Actors.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Young Children's Understanding of Helping as Increasing Another Agent's Utility.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- 11-month-olds recognize the teacher-student relationship.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Helpers or halos: examining the evaluative mechanisms underlying selective prosociality.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Editorial: Understanding the socio-emotional and socio-cognitive developmental pathways in children with sensory impairment.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The psychological foundations of reputation-based cooperation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- No good deed goes unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- 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
- Examining Infants' Individuation of Others by Sociomoral Disposition.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- 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
- Toddlers prefer those who win but not when they win by force.Nature human behaviour · 2018Article
- Preschoolers Focus on Others' Intentions When Forming Sociomoral Judgments.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- The Development of Anthropomorphism in Interaction: Intersubjectivity, Imagination, and Theory of Mind.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Stability of infants' preference for prosocial others: Implications for research based on single-choice paradigms.PloS one · 2017Article
- The Co-evolution of Honesty and Strategic Vigilance.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Several studies indicate that infants prefer individuals who act prosocially over those who act antisocially toward unrelated third parties. In the present study, we focused on a paradigm published by Kiley Hamlin and Karen Wynn in 2011. In this study, infants were habituated to a live puppet show in which a protagonist tried to open a box to retrieve a toy placed inside. The protagonist was either helped by a second puppet (the "Helper"), or hindered by a third puppet (the "Hinderer"). At test, infants were presented with the Helper and the Hinderer, and encouraged to reach for one of them. In the original study, 75% of 9-month-olds selected the Helper, arguably demonstrating a preference for prosocial over antisocial individuals. We conducted two studies with the aim of replicating this result. Each attempt was performed by a different group of experimenters. Study 1 followed the methods of the published study as faithfully as possible. Study 2 introduced slight modifications to the stimuli and the procedure following the guidelines generously provided by Kiley Hamlin and her collaborators. Yet, in our replication attempts, 9-month-olds' preference for helpers over hinderers did not differ significantly from chance (62.5% and 50%, respectively, in Studies 1 and 2). Two types of factors could explain why our results differed from those of Hamlin and Wynn: minor methodological dissimilarities (in procedure, materials, or the population tested), or the effect size being smaller than originally assumed. We conclude that fine methodological details that are crucial to infants' success in this task need to be identified to ensure the replicability of the original result.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.