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Plot of median testing date × proportion of infants choosing Helper/Push-up character in each laboratory. Note: Proportion of infants choosing the Helper/Push-up character (over Hinderer/Push-down character) in each laboratory plotted by the laboratory's median testing date. The dashed line on the y-axis represents chance performance. The smoothing line shows the estimated effects with credible intervals. Data are jittered slightly on the vertical axis to avoid overplotting. Each point represents data from one lab.
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Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... infants' choices of the Helper/PushUp Character in the nonsocial condition (43.33%) and the social condition (54.55%) were not different. Figure 6). All the other moderators and interaction effects had CIs that overlapped with zero (for details of the model parameter estimates, see Table 4). ...
Citations
... It is The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted https://doi.org/10.1101https://doi.org/10. /2025 3 2007, 2010; Holvoet et al., 2016;Margoni & Surian, 2018;Scarf et al., 2012), a recent large-scale and multi-lab replication study showed no preference for the helper over the hinderer social agents in children under 10 months (Lucca et al., 2025). ...
... The random choices found during the control session also indicated no effect of perceptual features of the shapes' movements on the videos. Our results are similar to the ones found in children (Lucca et al., 2025) and dogs (McAuliffe et al., 2019) but contrast with the hinderer preference found in bonobos (Krupenye & Hare, 2018). However, only adult bonobos and not subadults preferred the hinderer. ...
... However, the testing conditions of the hill paradigm might not have motivated Tonkean macaques to pay attention to the videos and to evaluate the animated agents' actions. Although the amount of attention our subjects paid did not affect their choices (similarly to children's results; Lucca et al., 2025), overall, they looked at the videos not more than 40 % of the time during the test and the control session. The attention to the videos was limited, although the experimenter called the subject and/or showed food when the subjects looked away to try to attract their attention back. ...
Evaluating others' prosocial tendencies can benefit individuals by allowing them to interact with prosocial individuals and avoid antisocial ones. The ontogeny of humans' strong prosocial preference has been widely investigated using the hill paradigm. Children's preference for helper over hinderer agents was measured after they watched a scene in which the helper agent pushed a climber up a hill while the hinderer agent pushed the climber down the hill. Bonobos tested with the hill paradigm preferred the hinderer over the helper, contrasting previous findings for other nonhuman primates. We tested Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana) using the same procedure as the one used with bonobos to see whether they would also exhibit a hinderer preference. Subjects did not prefer the helper over the hinderer (or vice versa). The low attentional level observed in our subjects suggests a lack of interest in the video stimuli. This finding relates to more general questions regarding how animals perceive abstract animated onscreen stimuli and the relevance of the hill paradigm in investigating prosocial preferences. Studies using various experimental paradigms with conspecifics or human actors as social agents are needed to investigate further the social evaluation of prosocial behaviours in Tonkean macaques, bonobos, and other primates.
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