Three-month-olds show a negativity bias in their social evaluations.

By J. Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, P. Bloom. 2010

488 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous research has shown that 6-month-olds evaluate others on the basis of their social behaviors—they are attracted to prosocial individuals, and avoid antisocial individuals (Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom, 2007). The current studies investigate these capacities prior to 6 months of age. Results from two experiments indicate that even 3-month-old infants evaluate others based on their social behavior towards third parties, and that negative social information is developmentally privileged.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Moral Judgment and Action in Preverbal Infants and Toddlers (2013, methodology): “…the preferential attention of 3-month-olds who could not yet reach, and we discovered that infants’ at University of British Columbia Library on October 29, 2014cdp.sagepub.comDownloaded from evaluations were initially driven by an aversion to Hinderers (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011; Hamlin et al., 2010).”
Further Evidence for Infants' Preference for Prosocial Over Antisocial Behaviors (2015, unknown): “Measuring preferential looking, Hamlin et al. (2010) showed that 3-months-old infants also demonstrated preference for the prosocial character in the “climbing the hill” paradigm.”
Psychological and Sociomoral Reasoning in Infancy (2014, background): “preferences were observed with 9-, 5-, and even 3-month-olds (using a preferential-looking measure) with various positive and negative actions (e.g., helping a puppet retrieve a toy from a box versus hindering the puppet by slamming the box shut; returning a ball to a puppet who had dropped it versu”
Infants Anticipate Others' Social Preferences (2012, background): “, 2007a, b; Hamlin &Wynn, in press), even compared with a neutral character (Hamlin et al., 2010).”