Friends or foes: Infants use shared evaluations to infer others’ social relationships

摘要

Predicting others’ affiliative relationships is critical to social cognition, but there is little evidence of how this ability develops. We examined 9-month-old infants’ inferences about third-party affiliation based on shared and opposing evaluations. Infants expected two people who expressed shared evaluations to interact positively, whereas they expected two people who expressed opposing evaluations to interact negatively. A control condition revealed that infants’ expectations could not be due to mere perceptual repetition. Thus, an abstract understanding that third-party affiliation can be based on shared intentions has roots in the first year of life. These findings have implications for understanding humans’ earliest representations of the social world.