Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz

Research has established that children are “naive psychologists,” adept at understanding and navigating the social world from an early age. However, most of this work has focused on how children process information that they acquire incidentally, for example, by passively observing others’ actions. Here, we draw on literature framing children as intuitive scientists who actively seek information and test hypotheses to propose a view of children as naive experimental psychologists. From this perspective, children play an active role in selecting and pursuing relevant social information (e.g., about agents’ goals, traits, or relationships), whereby their search strategies are influenced both by context and task demands, as well as their prior beliefs, concepts, and domain-specific naive theories. We argue that the particular challenges associated with learning and reasoning about other minds may necessitate that children leverage their active learning competences, and we outline how the social domain uniquely constrains and shapes the learning process. We review existing research on social-information seeking in children and adults and identify directions for future research, emphasizing that children’s developing social cognition should be understood in terms of the active, exploratory role they take in learning about and participating in the social world.

A series of experiments conducted in Central Europe (Hungary, Austria) and East Asia (Japan) probed whether 5- to 10-year-old children (n = 436, 213 female) and adults (n = 71, 43 female; all data collected between July 2020 and May 2023) would infer traits and choose partners accordingly, in a novel touchscreen game. The participants observed third-party actions and interactions of animated agents whose behavior varied in prosociality and skill, and subsequently selected whom to play with in potentially cooperative endeavors. Overall, the results indicate (1) that trait inference may not naturally follow from action understanding but relies on learning and experimental task framing, and (2) that by 7 years of age, children begin to capitalize on such inferences in partner choice.

Instrumental helping is one of the paradigmatic “prosocial” behaviors featured in developmental research on sociomoral reasoning, but not much is known about how children recognize instances of helping behaviors or understand the term ‘help’. Here, we examined whether young children represent helping as a second-order goal and take it to mean increasing the utility of another agent. In Study 1, we tested whether 12-month-old infants would expect an agent who previously helped to perform an action that reduced the Helpee’s action cost. We found that while infants expected agents to act individually efficiently (Experiment 1C), they did not expect the agent to choose the action that maximally reduced the Helpee’s cost compared to an action that reduced the cost less (Experiment 1A) or not at all (Experiment 1B). In Study 2, we examined whether three-year-old preschoolers (1) maximize a Helpee’s cost reduction when prompted to help in a first-person task, and (2) identify in a third-party context which of two agents, performing superficially similar behaviors with varying effects on the Helpee’s action options, actually helped. Contrary to our predictions, preschoolers did not help in a way that maximally reduced the Helpee’s cost in (1). In (2), however, they indicated that the agent who reduced the Helpee’s action cost was the one who helped. Taken together, these results support the proposal that, at least by preschool age, children possess a second-order utility-based concept of helping, but that they may not exhibit efficiency when choosing their own helping actions.

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third‐party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried but failed to climb a hill. This sparked a new line of inquiry into the origins of social evaluations; however, replication attempts have yielded mixed results. We present a preregistered, multi‐laboratory, standardized study aimed at replicating infants’ preference for Helpers over Hinderers. We intended to (1) provide a precise estimate of the effect size of infants’ preference for Helpers over Hinderers, and (2) determine the degree to which preferences are based on social information. Using the ManyBabies framework for big team‐based science, we tested 1018 infants (567 included, 5.5–10.5 months) from 37 labs across five continents. Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition, and 55.85% preferred characters who pushed up, versus down, an inanimate object in the nonsocial condition; neither proportion differed from chance or from each other. This study provides evidence against infants’ prosocial preferences in the hill paradigm, suggesting the effect size is weaker, absent, and/or develops later than previously estimated. As the first of its kind, this study serves as a proof‐of‐concept for using active behavioral measures (e.g., manual choice) in large‐scale, multi‐lab projects studying infants.

Hamlin et al . found in 2007 that preverbal infants displayed a preference for helpers over hinderers. The robustness of this finding and the conditions under which infant sociomoral evaluation can be elicited has since been debated. Here, we conducted a replication of the original study, in which we tested 14- to 16-month-olds using a familiarization procedure with three-dimensional animated video stimuli. Unlike previous replication attempts, ours uniquely benefited from detailed procedural advice by Hamlin. In contrast with the original results, only 16 out of 32 infants (50%) in our study reached for the helper; thus, we were not able to replicate the findings. A possible reason for this failure is that infants' preference for prosocial agents may not be reliably elicited with the procedure and stimuli adopted. Alternatively, the effect size of infants’ preference may be smaller than originally estimated. The study addresses ongoing methodological debates on the replicability of influential findings in infant cognition.

A study of the archaeological record confirmed that chimpanzees migrating from a population south of the South group cracked nuts with wooden tools prior to migrating, but adopted the new group's preference for stone tools when they relocated. L. Luncz, R. Munddry and C. Boesch studied the coula edulis nut-cracking behavior of three neighboring chimpanzee groups in the Tai forest. The nut-cracking behavior of the South group at Tai can be described by the rule when possible, always use stone hammers. Some studies have tested for chimpanzee conformity by watching the spread of behaviors within groups. The primates appear to have societal norms, and individuals appear to have at least an implicit understanding of the relevant normative rules. The socially learned and group-specific patterns of behavior are good candidates for social norms. If behavioral evidence suggested that chimpanzees do conform to social norms, issues of the cognition required for normativity may need to be reconsidered.