Social Evaluation in Infants and Toddlers

婴幼儿的社会评价

• 批准号: 0715557
• 负责人: M. Karen Wynn
• 金额: $ 17.5万
• 依托单位: Yale University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-08-01 至 2009-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0715557&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Social; Evaluation; Infants; Toddlers

It is a human universal to classify some people as friends and others as enemies, and to judge their actions as right or wrong. Indeed, sociologists, economists, and evolutionary biologists have argued that social evaluation is a prerequisite for human interaction among non-relatives. Altruism can only evolve if individuals have some capacity to categorize, and remember, other individuals as helpful or as antagonistic. At the same time, however, there is considerable cross-cultural variation in what counts as a kind or a cruel act, and hence societies differ in how people come to classify and judge other people around them.The studies proposed here explore the emergence of social evaluation in infants and young children, examining which aspects are present from the earliest months of life, and which require cultural support and social learning. This project will examine, specifically, both how infants and young children come to understand social evaluation processes in others, and how they form their own positive and negative attitudes towards individuals.Our studies are based on previous findings from the PI and colleagues showing that pre-verbal infants form expectations about how individuals will respond to each other based on their previous interactions. For example, by 9 months of age, infants expect an individual to later approach another who was previously helpful, and to avoid another who was previously antagonistic. The experiments in Series 1 use a looking-time method to explore the nature of this understanding. Do babies really believe that an individual likes one who helped it and dislikes one who harmed it? Experiments in Series 2 use a variety of methods to explore the conditions under which infants and toddlers themselves make positive and negative social evaluations. Do infants themselves like a helper and dislike a harmer?These studies address central debates within developmental psychology, but they also bear on broader questions about the role of innate knowledge and cultural learning in the genesis of human social interaction. Increasing our scientific understanding of the developmental origins of social evaluation will aid us in better understanding such important social phenomena as prejudice, stereotypes, and moral judgment and reasoning.

把一些人划分为朋友，把另一些人划分为敌人，并判断他们的行为是对还是错，这是人类的共性。事实上，社会学家、经济学家和进化生物学家都认为，社会评价是人类在非亲属之间进行互动的先决条件。利他主义只有在个体有能力将其他个体分类并记住它们是有益的还是敌对的情况下才能进化。然而，与此同时，在什么是善良或残忍的行为上，存在着相当大的跨文化差异，因此，人们如何对周围的人进行分类和判断，在社会上也是不同的。这里提出的研究探讨了婴儿和幼儿社会评价的出现，检查了哪些方面从生命的最初几个月就存在，哪些方面需要文化支持和社会学习。该项目将具体研究婴儿和幼儿如何理解他人的社会评价过程，以及他们如何形成自己对个人的积极和消极态度。我们的研究是基于PI和同事们之前的研究结果，这些发现表明，语言前的婴儿会根据他们之前的互动形成对个体如何相互反应的期望。例如，到9个月大的时候，婴儿期望一个人后来接近另一个以前有帮助的人，并避免另一个以前敌对的人。系列1中的实验使用了一种观察时间的方法来探索这种理解的本质。婴儿真的相信一个人喜欢帮助他的人，不喜欢伤害他的人吗？系列2的实验采用多种方法探索婴幼儿自身做出积极和消极社会评价的条件。婴儿自己喜欢帮助者，不喜欢伤害者吗？这些研究解决了发展心理学中的核心争论，但它们也涉及了关于先天知识和文化学习在人类社会互动起源中的作用的更广泛的问题。增加我们对社会评价发展起源的科学理解，将有助于我们更好地理解偏见、刻板印象、道德判断和推理等重要的社会现象。