Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Show Increased Helping Following Priming with Affiliation
Abstract
We show that the mere hint of affiliation dramatically increases prosocial behavior in infants. Eighteen-month-old infants helped a person in need more often, and more spontaneously, when primed with photographs evoking affiliation than when primed with photographs evoking individuality. This study demonstrates that social primes can have an influence on infant behavior, and so opens up a wealth of possibilities for future research. In addition, these data have wide-ranging practical implications, suggesting that subtle changes to the social environment can promote prosocial behavior in children.
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
REFERENCES
Anderson C.A., Benjamin A.J., Bartholow B.D. (1998). Does the gun pull the trigger?: Automatic priming effects of weapon pictures and weapon names. Psychological Science, 9, 308–314.
Bargh J.A., Chen M., Burrows L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230–244.
Bargh J.A., Gollwitzer P.M., Lee-Chai A., Barndollar K., Trötschel R. (2001). The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1014–1027.
Brewer M.B. (2004). Taking the social origins of human nature seriously: Toward a more imperialist social psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 107–113.
Fusaro M., Harris P.L. (2008). Children assess informant reliability using bystanders' non-verbal cues. Developmental Science, 11, 771–777.
Gintis H., Bowles S., Boyd R., Fehr E. (2003). Explaining altruistic behavior in humans. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24, 153–172.
Kinzler K.D., Dupoux E., Spelke E.S. (2007). The native language of social cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 104, 12577–12580.
Lakin J.L., Chartrand T.L. (2003). Using nonconscious behavioral mimicry to create affiliation and rapport. Psychological Science, 14, 334–339.
Macrae C.N., Johnston L. (1998). Help, I need somebody: Automatic action and inaction. Social Cognition, 16, 400–417.
Over H., Carpenter M. (2009). Priming third-party ostracism increases affiliative imitation in children. Developmental Science, 12, F1–F8.
Spears R., Gordijn E.H., Dijksterhuis A., Stapel D.A. (2004). Reaction in action: Intergroup contrast in automatic behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 605–616.
Trivers R.L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57.
van Baaren R.B., Holland R.W., Kawakami K., van Knippenberg A. (2004). Mimicry and prosocial behavior. Psychological Science, 15, 71–74.
Warneken F., Tomasello M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science, 311, 1301–1303.
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: October 1, 2009
Issue published: October 2009
History
Manuscript received: August 13, 2008
Revision received: February 26, 2009
Published online: October 1, 2009
Issue published: October 2009
PubMed: 19674388
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Article usage*
Total views and downloads: 2590
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Altmetric
See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores
Articles citing this one
Web of Science: 130 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 123
- Oxytocin attenuates racial categorization in 14-month-old infants
- Research on prosocial screen and immersive media effects: a systematic...
- Early prosociality is conditional on opportunity cost and familiarity ...
- The Emergency of Prosociality: A Developmental Perspective on Altruism...
- Third Trimester Fetuses Demonstrate Priming, a Form of Implicit Memory...
- Love or Comprehension? Exploring Strategies for Children’s Prosocial M...
- Visuo-Motor Affective Interplay: Bonding Scenes Promote Implicit Motor...
- Social Cognitive Development
- Prosocial Behavior in Preschoolers: Effects of Early Socialization Exp...
- Social Stimulation by the Owner Increases Dogs’ (Canis familiaris) Soc...
- The hidden life of the consumer mind
- Born for Relationships
- Attachment Trauma: How to Tailor Coaching for Parents of Children in F...
- Priming third-party social exclusion does not elicit children's inclus...
- Priming Effects on Prosocial Behavior of Children: a Systematic Review
- Human infants can override possessive tendencies to share valued items...
- Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Mon...
- Competence-based helping: Children’s consideration of need when provid...
- Stopping at nothing: Two-year-olds differentiate between interrupted a...
- Insight into toddlers’ motivation to help: From social participants to...
- Affect matters: Positive and negative social stimulation influences do...
- Be Responsible?
- A Motivational Perspective on the Development of Social Essentialism
- Collective Intentionality, Inferentialism and the Capacity for Claim-M...
- Significance of Helping
- Five-year-olds’ facial mimicry following social ostracism is modulated...
- Helping others in interaction
- The Effect of a Context‐Specific Primed Goal on Goal Commitment and Te...
- The effect of educational priming on face recognition from a silver al...
- Shared Intentionality and the Cooperative Evolutionary Hypothesis
- Die Evolution als Basis für das Verhalten
- Why do children essentialize social groups?
- From understanding others' needs to prosocial action: Motor and social...
- Evaluative Audience Perception (EAP): How Children Come to Care About ...
- Affiliation motivates children’s prosocial behaviors: Relating helping...
- Examining Character Structure and Function Across Childhood and Adoles...
- Making Sense of Other People’s Encounters: Towards an Integrative Mode...
- Effects of coordination and gender on prosocial behavior in 4-year-old...
- Why do infants help? A simple action reveals a complex phenomenon
- Significance of Helping
- Closing the gender gap in competitiveness through priming
- Toddlers prefer to help familiar people
- Collaborative and competitive motivations uniquely impact infants' rac...
- Is Overimitation a Uniquely Human Phenomenon? Insights From Human Chil...
- Infants’ prosocial behavior is governed by cost-benefit analyses
- Early Reputation Management: Three-Year-Old Children Are More Generous...
- How interpersonal synchrony facilitates early prosocial behavior
- Thinking of me: Self-focus reduces sharing and helping in seven- to ei...
- Children’s Contributions in Family Work: Two Cultural Paradigms
- Communal sharing/identity fusion does not require reflection on episod...
- The multifaceted nature of prosocial behavior in children: Links with ...
- “Help Yourself!” What Can Toddlers' Helping Failures Tell Us About the...
- Infants possess an abstract expectation of ingroup support
- Bonding Pictures: Affective Ratings Are Specifically Associated to Lon...
- The impact of social relationships on Ugandan children’s sharing decis...
- Helping the One You Hurt: Toddlers’ Rudimentary Guilt, Shame, and Pros...
- The Influence of Socialization on Early Helping From a Cross-Cultural ...
- How the Subjective Relationship Between the Self, Others, and a Task D...
- Putting Ostracism into Perspective: Young Children Tell More Mentalist...
- Prosocial Behavior in Infancy: The Role of Socialization
- Young Children Want to See Others Get the Help They Need
- Social Effects of Movement Synchrony: Increased Infant Helpfulness onl...
- Social Pre-treatment Modulates Attention Allocation to Transient and S...
- Emergence of Altruistic Behavior Through the Minimization of Predictio...
- When the body reveals the mind: Children’s use of others’ body orienta...
- Commentary: A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharin...
- Does Context Matter? Mastery Motivation and Therapy Engagement of Chil...
- Money Cues Increase Agency and Decrease Prosociality Among Children...
- Insights into the biological foundation of human altruistic sentiments
- The origins of belonging: social motivation in infants and young child...
- Free Will in Behavior: Believing Makes It So
- Children’s Contributions in Family Work: Two Cultural Paradigms
- Children’s Contributions in Family Work: Two Cultural Paradigms
- Spontaneous Goal Inference (SGI)
- Children infer affiliative and status relations from watching others i...
- Social priming enhances interpersonal synchronization and feeling of c...
- Not So Innocent: Toddlers’ Inferences About Costs and Culpability
- Early socialization of prosocial behavior: Patterns in parents’ encour...
- Nonconscious priming of communication
- Rock With Me: The Role of Movement Synchrony in Infants' Social and No...
- Beyond Good and Evil...
- Biological Motion Primes the Animate/Inanimate Distinction in Infancy
- Preparing to caress: a neural signature of social bonding
- Social understanding and self-regulation predict pre-schoolers’ sharin...
- Priming
- Fourteen-month-old infants use interpersonal synchrony as a cue to dir...
- Social Priming Increases Nonverbal Expressive Behaviors in Schizophren...
- A model of personality should be a cognitive architecture itself
- Social Knowledge Facilitates Chunking in Infancy
- The Emergence of Prosocial Behavior: Why Do Infants and Toddlers Help,...
- The Historical Origins of Priming as the Preparation of Behavioral Res...
- Here, there and everywhere: emotion and mental state talk in different...
- “Helping” Versus “Being a Helper”: Invoking the Self to Increase Helpi...
- Priming as a way of understanding children’s mental representations of...
- The Mind in the Middle
- Does synchrony promote generalized prosociality?
- Welcome Back Theory!
- Whom do children copy? Model-based biases in social learning
- From cleaning up to helping out: Parental socialization and children's...
- The opportunity to collaborate increases preschoolers’ motivation for ...
- Infants Help a Non-Human Agent
- Being Mimicked Increases Prosocial Behavior in 18-Month-Old Infants
- Young children care more about their reputation with ingroup members a...
- Parental Presence and Encouragement Do Not Influence Helping in Young ...
- The Social Side of Imitation
- Minimal Groups Increase Young Children's Motivation and Learning on Gr...
- Neural correlates of prosocial behavior in infancy: Different neurophy...
- Young children proactively remedy unnoticed accidents
- Caring for Sharing
- Early Development of Prosocial Behavior: Current Perspectives
- Socialization of Early Prosocial Behavior: Parents’ Talk About Emotion...
- Automaticity in social-cognitive processes
- Cold-blooded loneliness: Social exclusion leads to lower skin temperat...
- The effects of temperature on service employees' customer orientation:...
- Best friends: children use mutual gaze to identify friendships in othe...
- Infants’ Developing Understanding of Social Gaze
- Affiliative Stimuli as Primers to Prosocial Predispositions
- Metarelational models: Configurations of social relationships
- Producing and Understanding Prosocial Actions in Early Childhood
- Indirect goal priming is more powerful than explicit instruction in ch...
- Big and Mighty: Preverbal Infants Mentally Represent Social Dominance
- Varieties of altruism in children and chimpanzees
- Priming
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Get access
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
loading institutional access options
APS members can access this journal content using society membership credentials.
APS members can access this journal content using society membership credentials.
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
