Babies 'prefer helpful people'
Babies can work out which people are helpful, study finds
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Thursday, 22, Nov 2007 12:29
Babies are able to identify helpful people and those that pose a threat at just a few months of age, a new study has found.
Researchers from Yale University discovered that babies prefer individuals who help others to those who either do nothing or interfere with others' goals.
They studied six- and ten-month-old babies and their preferences based on two characters.
A wooden character known as 'the climber' was placed at the bottom of a hill and repeatedly tried to climb it.
The climber was then either helped to the top by a triangular character or hindered by a square character that pushed it down the hill.
After enough time for the babies to process the events they then watched which characters they reached for.
All but two of the ten-month-olds and all of the six-month-olds preferred the helper.
In another experiment babies of both ages preferred a helper to a neutral party, and then a neutral party over one who hindered.
Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers say that the fact social evaluation takes place so early in infancy suggests that it is "central to processing the social world, both evolutionary and developmentally".
This would have been useful, for example, for early man to learn which people would be helpful for group activities such as hunting, food sharing and warfare.