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Infants' Reasoning About Agents' Identity: The Case Of Sociomoral Kinds, Hernando Taborda

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent studies in development psychology suggest that early on infants are able to distinguish characters who display a cooperative behavior from characters who display an antisocial behavior. The current research builds on these findings and aims at determining the extent to which infants possess the sociomoral distinction of “good” and “mean” agents. In particular, we propose that infants represent sociomoral behaviors through kind-based categories. This hypothesis was tested in the current research across 5 different experiments by investigating how infants represent the identity of agents in sociomoral situations. Experiment 1 used a looking-time paradigm to demonstrate 11-month-old infants’ bias to …