Open AccessThe choice is yours: Infants’ expectations about an agent’s future behavior based on taking and receiving actions.
Author(s) -
Arianne E. Eason,
Daniel H. Doctor,
Ellen T. Chang,
Tamar Kushnir,
Jessica A. Sommerville
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.318
H-Index - 213
eISSN - 1939-0599
pISSN - 0012-1649
DOI - 10.1037/dev0000482
Subject(s) - psychology , psycinfo , context (archaeology) , receipt , social psychology , autonomy , object (grammar) , value (mathematics) , action (physics) , developmental psychology , medline , paleontology , linguistics , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , machine learning , world wide web , political science , computer science , law , biology
Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test the ontogeny of this phenomenon; that is, whether infants are sensitive to the causal history associated with an agent's acquisition of an object. We demonstrate that on average, 12.5-month-old American infants view taking actions as a better indication of an agent's future behavior than are receiving actions. Furthermore, there were significant individual differences in the extent to which infants perceived object receipt to be indicative of future behavior. Specifically, the less autonomous infants were perceived to be (by their parents), socialized to be, and behaved, the more they viewed object receipt as indicative of future behavior. The results are discussed in terms of the role of individual and cultural experience in early understanding of intentional action. (PsycINFO Database Record