Department of Psychology, University of Washington.
Department of Human Development, Cornell University.
Dev Psychol. 2018 May;54(5):829-841. doi: 10.1037/dev0000482. Epub 2017 Dec 28.
Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test the ontogeny of this phenomenon; that is, whether infants are sensitive to the causal history associated with an agent's acquisition of an object. We demonstrate that on average, 12.5-month-old American infants view taking actions as a better indication of an agent's future behavior than are receiving actions. Furthermore, there were significant individual differences in the extent to which infants perceived object receipt to be indicative of future behavior. Specifically, the less autonomous infants were perceived to be (by their parents), socialized to be, and behaved, the more they viewed object receipt as indicative of future behavior. The results are discussed in terms of the role of individual and cultural experience in early understanding of intentional action. (PsycINFO Database Record
我们的社会世界充满了关于他人选择的信息，这些信息随后会影响我们对他们未来行为的推断。对于在美国文化背景下社会化的个体来说，他们非常重视自主性和独立性，因此由个体自身选择所产生的结果可能比由他人选择所产生的类似结果具有更高的预测价值。在两项实验中，我们检验了这种现象的发展过程；也就是说，婴儿是否对与主体获得物体相关的因果历史敏感。我们证明，平均而言，12.5 个月大的美国婴儿认为采取行动比接受行动更能表明主体的未来行为。此外，婴儿认为接收物体能指示未来行为的程度存在显著的个体差异。具体来说，父母认为婴儿自主性越低，他们受到的社会化影响越大，他们就越认为接收物体能指示未来行为。这些结果是从个体和文化经验在早期对意图行为的理解中的作用方面进行讨论的。
