In a neat little study that I once filmed (look for it on YouTube), researcher Kiley Hamlin demonstrated this finding.
She set up a puppet show of sorts, with the main characters as a few shapes – a triangle 🔺️, circle 🔵, or square ⬛ – each with a pair of googly eyes 👀 stuck on them. (The eyes give the shapes a more human look.)
A 6 or 10-month old 👶sees one of the shapes, say a square (though the shapes were randomized in the experiment), attempt to go up a ramp. The square, tries and tries, but just can’t get to the top. Next, the baby sees a 2nd shape come out at the bottom of the ramp. This shape is seen bumping up the square to the top of the ramp – it looks like it is helping the square reach its goal. The baby then sees a 3rd scene. In this one, just as the square is getting to the top of the ramp, a new different shape comes out and pushes it back down to the bottom! No helping the square’s efforts… just hindering them.
The child sees these scenarios a few times and is then presented a tray with two of the shapes on it – the helper and the hinderer. Almost universally, the babies showed a preference (demonstrated by which they touched first) for the shape that was presented as the ‘helper.’ This inclination to the helper is so strong, that they found it to be the case even when they de-humanized the shapes by taking off the googly eyes.
Later, Hamlin and her colleagues tested this on 3 month olds (tracking their eye movement as a measurement for preference since these little babies couldn’t control their reach) and she found that even babies this young seemed to react more positively to the helper!
What does this mean as a parent? On the one hand, it’s a powerful reminder of the remarkable capabilities that even the youngest babies have, and just how much they are tuned into other people. In addition, we hope that our children don’t have enough personal experience with unhelpful people in their little lives as to have learned this preference… which may suggest that we come into the world liking nicer people over mean ones.
And doesn’t that give us all a little hope? ❤❤❤