Cognitive Connie
Understanding moral development in infancy
For most of the twentieth century, moral development was understood as something that happened to children over the course of years of socialisation, language acquisition, and cognitive maturation. Infants were regarded as pre-moral — associal, unable to understand others' intentions, and incapable of evaluating actions as right or wrong. Research since the 2000s has overturned this assumption so completely that the field now asks not whether infants have proto-moral cognition, but how rich and domain-specific it is.
Key figures
Karen Wynn
b. 1963Developmental cognitive scientist whose work on infant numerical cognition and, with Hamlin and Bloom, on infant social evaluation provided foundational evidence that infants are not pre-social or pre-moral. Her lab's helper/hinderer studies are among the most replicated findings in infant cognitive development.
Felix Warneken
b. 1975Demonstrated spontaneous altruistic helping in 14–18-month-old infants and in young chimpanzees, arguing that the capacity for altruistic helping has deep evolutionary roots and is not purely a product of human socialisation.
Kiley Hamlin
b. 1980Led the landmark studies showing that pre-verbal 6-month-old infants prefer helpers over hinderers, establishing that social evaluation — distinguishing prosocial from antisocial agents — is present long before language and conscious reasoning. Work at Yale with Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom.
Key concepts
Social Evaluation
The capacity to represent agents as good or bad based on whether their actions help or hinder another agent's goals. Demonstrated in infants as young as 3–6 months using looking-time and reaching paradigms. Infants consistently prefer helpers over hinderers, suggesting an early sensitivity to the morally relevant distinction between prosocial and antisocial agents.
Helper/Hinderer Paradigm
An experimental paradigm developed by Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom in which infants observe a protagonist struggling to achieve a goal and a third-party agent who either helps or hinders. Infants' preferential reaching for the helper (or longer looking at unexpected hinderer-preference) is interpreted as evidence of proto-moral social evaluation.
Spontaneous Altruistic Helping
The tendency of 14–18-month-old infants to assist an adult struggling to achieve a goal, without prompting, instruction, or expectation of reward. Demonstrated by Warneken and Tomasello across a range of instrumental helping tasks. Distinguished from imitation (the adult is not successfully completing the action) and from learned prosocial behaviour (appears before extensive socialisation).
Goal Attribution
The capacity to represent another agent's intended end-state — distinct from the observable behaviour the agent is currently producing. Emerges reliably around 9–12 months and is considered a prerequisite for both social evaluation and spontaneous helping: to help someone achieve their goal, the infant must represent what that goal is; to evaluate a helper/hinderer, the infant must represent the protagonist's goal and assess each agent's relationship to it.
Fairness Sensitivity
Evidence that infants are sensitive to unequal distribution of resources. Studies using looking-time measures suggest that by 15 months, infants look longer at unexpected equal distributions when context cues predict inequality, and vice versa — suggesting they have a working model of fair distribution that can be violated. By 19–21 months, toddlers begin to share spontaneously with an unfamiliar recipient.
Test your knowledge
Sources
Last reviewed July 2025- 1.
Hamlin J.K., Wynn K., & Bloom P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450, 557–559.
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The landmark study demonstrating that 6-month-old infants prefer helpers over hinderers.
- 2.
Warneken F. & Tomasello M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science, 311, 1301–1303.
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Demonstrated spontaneous altruistic helping in 18-month-old infants and young chimpanzees.