Vizmathy Liza, Begus Katarina, Knoblich Gunther, Gergely György, Curioni Arianna
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria.
Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Open Mind (Camb). 2024 Feb 1;8:1-16. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00115. eCollection 2024.
Humans engage in cooperative activities from early on and the breadth of human cooperation is unparalleled. Human preference for cooperation might reflect cognitive and motivational mechanisms that drive engagement in cooperative activities. Here we investigate early indices of humans' cooperative abilities and test whether 14-month-old infants expect agents to prefer cooperative over individual goal achievement. Three groups of infants saw videos of agents facing a choice between two actions that led to identical rewards but differed in the individual costs. Our results show that, in line with prior research, infants expect agents to make instrumentally rational choices and prefer the less costly of two individual action alternatives. In contrast, when one of the action alternatives is cooperative, infants expect agents to choose cooperation over individual action, even though the cooperative action demands more effort from each agent to achieve the same outcome. Finally, we do not find evidence that infants expect agents to choose the less costly alternative when both options entail cooperative action. Combined, these results indicate an ontogenetically early expectation of cooperation, and raise interesting implications and questions regarding the nature of infants' representations of cooperative actions and their utility.
人类从很早就开始参与合作活动，而且人类合作的广度是无与伦比的。人类对合作的偏好可能反映了驱动人们参与合作活动的认知和动机机制。在此，我们研究人类合作能力的早期指标，并测试14个月大的婴儿是否期望行动者更倾向于合作而非个人目标的实现。三组婴儿观看了行动者面临两种行动选择的视频，这两种行动会带来相同的奖励，但个人成本不同。我们的结果表明，与先前的研究一致，婴儿期望行动者做出工具性理性的选择，并更喜欢两种个人行动选择中成本较低的那种。相比之下，当其中一种行动选择是合作性的时，婴儿期望行动者选择合作而非个人行动，即使合作行动需要每个行动者付出更多努力才能实现相同的结果。最后，我们没有发现证据表明当两种选择都涉及合作行动时，婴儿期望行动者选择成本较低的选项。综合来看，这些结果表明在个体发生早期就存在对合作的期望，并引发了关于婴儿对合作行动的表征及其效用的本质的有趣启示和问题。
