Schlingloff Laura, Csibra Gergely, Tatone Denis
Cognitive Development Center, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Apr 1;7(4):191795. doi: 10.1098/rsos.191795. eCollection 2020 Apr.
Hamlin . found in 2007 that preverbal infants displayed a preference for helpers over hinderers. The robustness of this finding and the conditions under which infant sociomoral evaluation can be elicited has since been debated. Here, we conducted a replication of the original study, in which we tested 14- to 16-month-olds using a familiarization procedure with three-dimensional animated video stimuli. Unlike previous replication attempts, ours uniquely benefited from detailed procedural advice by Hamlin. In contrast with the original results, only 16 out of 32 infants (50%) in our study reached for the helper; thus, we were not able to replicate the findings. A possible reason for this failure is that infants' preference for prosocial agents may not be reliably elicited with the procedure and stimuli adopted. Alternatively, the effect size of infants' preference may be smaller than originally estimated. The study addresses ongoing methodological debates on the replicability of influential findings in infant cognition.
哈姆林在2007年发现，尚不能言语的婴儿表现出对帮助者而非阻碍者的偏好。自那以后，这一发现的稳健性以及能够引发婴儿社会道德评价的条件一直存在争议。在此，我们对原研究进行了复制，在研究中我们使用三维动画视频刺激的熟悉程序对14至16个月大的婴儿进行了测试。与之前的复制尝试不同，我们的研究独特地受益于哈姆林提供的详细程序建议。与原始结果相反，在我们的研究中，32名婴儿中只有16名（50%）伸手去够帮助者；因此，我们未能复制出这些发现。这一失败的一个可能原因是，采用的程序和刺激可能无法可靠地引发婴儿对亲社会主体的偏好。或者，婴儿偏好的效应大小可能比最初估计的要小。这项研究解决了关于婴儿认知领域有影响力的发现的可重复性的持续方法论争论。
