Moral Development in Infancy

All 5 Terms & Definitions

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.