By the second year of life, infants expect group leaders to right the wrongs of subordinates, a study finds. Adults expect leaders of social groups to intervene when within-group transgressions occur. To explore the developmental roots of this expectation, Maayan Stavans and Renée Baillargeon showed 120 17-month-old infants live events involving 3 bear puppets that served as the protagonist, wrongdoer, and victim. The protagonist brought 2 toys for the other bears to share, but the wrongdoer took both toys, with none for the victim. The protagonist then either redistributed 1 toy from the wrongdoer to the victim (intervention event), or approached each bear without redistributing a toy (nonintervention event). The protagonist was either a nonleader or a leader, as indicated by behavioral or physical cues. The infants looked longer at the nonintervention event than at the intervention event when the protagonist was a leader, but looked equally at both events when the protagonist was a nonleader. The findings suggest that the infants expected the leader to rectify the wrongdoer's transgression, but did not hold the same expectation for the nonleader. According to the authors, the results suggest that abstract expectation of authority is part of the basic structure of human moral cognition.
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Article #18-20091: "Infants expect leaders to right wrongs," by Maayan Stavans and Renée Baillargeon
MEDIA CONTACTS: Maayan Stavans, Central European University, Budapest, HUNGARY; e-mail: <mstavans.uiuc@gmail.com>; Renée Baillargeon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL; tel: 217-333-5557; e-mail: <rbaillar@illinois.edu>
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences