ArticleFrontiers in psychology2023
Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Infants use helping to infer the existence and strength of caring relationships.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Infants make moral character inferences in multi-agent social interactions.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Eleven-Month-Old Infants Preferentially Look at Helpers But Do Not Reliably Evaluate Inconsistent Actors.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Core Moral Concepts and the Sense of Fairness in Human Infants.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Review
- Infants Recognize the Negative Impact of Phone Distraction on Performance.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Across two experiments, we investigated whether infants use prior behavior to form expectations about future behavior within the moral domain, focusing on the sub-domains of fairness and help/harm. In Experiment 1, 14- to 27-month-old infants were familiarized to an agent who either helped or hindered another agent to obtain her goal. At test, infants saw the helper or hinderer perform either a fair or unfair distribution of resources to two recipients. Infants familiarized to helping looked longer to the unfair distribution than the fair distribution at test, whereas infants familiarized to hindering looked equally at both test events, suggesting that hindering led infants to suspend baseline expectations of fairness. In Experiment 2, infants saw these events in reverse. Following familiarization to fair behavior, infants looked equally to helping and hindering; in contrast, following familiarization to unfair behavior, infants looked significantly longer to helping than hindering on test, suggesting that prior unfair behavior led infants to expect the agent to hinder another agent's goals. These results suggest that infants utilize prior information from one moral sub-domain to form expectations of how an individual will behave in another sub-domain, and that this tendency seems to manifest more strongly when infants initially see hindering and unfair distributions than when they see helping and fair distributions. Together, these findings provide evidence for consilience within the moral domain, starting by at least the second year of life.
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