Babies learn quickly and a lot, their number one role model: the parents. They already know their mother’s voice at birth and their face at three months. Right from the start, they pay attention to how their parents react emotionally to unfamiliar situations – to learn from it. They recognize sadness and anger early. By four months they know that if someone mirrors another person, such as their smile or their movement, then he or she will probably approach that person. Before they’ve even completed the first year of life, children already have an amazing social instinct: A Study from 2019 showed that five-month-old babies can hear whether a group of laughing people are friends with one another or not.
Humans are born into a tangled web of social relationships and quickly develop remarkable strategies for navigating it. Brief observations are often sufficient: Small children expect two people with similar clothing, language or eating habits to behave in a friendly manner. When a baby sees two people being comforted by a third person, he expects the comforted person to make contact afterwards. They shape their own relationships with others heavily through their parents. They are therefore more likely to accept toys from people who speak their parents’ mother tongue and dialect or sing the songs they know from home.
What is less well known, however, is how parents’ behavior toward strangers influences their children’s ability to trust these strangers. Now, a study in science magazine PNAS: Toddlers make judgments about “social partners” by closely observing how their parents interact with them. The behavioral scientist has Ashley J Thomas from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), together with their colleagues Rebecca Saxe and Elisabeth Spelke, carried out five experiments with around 20 babies each: The children, around 12 months old, were shown videos of their parents interacting with strangers.
When the parents imitated a doll, the babies also made contact with them
The role of the “strangers” was not played by real people, but by dolls with colorful button noses and long shaggy hair. There is a reason for the Muppet-like creatures, as the researchers write: “Their simplified social repertoire allows precise experimental control of the interactions shown,” and puppets have the advantage that they can be designed neutrally, without a specific age, gender or Ethnicity that could induce social expectations. In addition, the children, all from the urban Northeast of the USA, know dolls from home.
A parent with two dolls was shown in the videos. The parent imitated sounds from one pupa but not from the other. Then the children could reach for the dolls. The vast majority then reached for the puppet whose sound their parent had imitated – they were obviously more interesting, after all the parent had shown more connection with these puppets.
In the following experiments, the researchers worked with language: a strange voice called the children’s names while the dolls were visible at the same time. The result was clear: looking for the origin of the voice, the children looked at the puppet imitated by their parent, which was obviously the one from which they expected to make contact. On the other hand, when the dolls were turned away and called out someone else’s name, the children didn’t fixate on either of them. From the behavior of their parents, the babies “selectively” inferred a potential social partner. The same didn’t work, by the way, when an alien parent imitated the doll. This is different when learning names, the purpose of objects or even social norms: they learn them from parents and strangers alike.
In the last experiment, the researchers first had a doll call out the child’s name. Then they played the baby a video in which his mother simulated distress and buried her face in her hands. Here, too, the children looked at the doll that had previously called their name: they expected it to comfort their mother. Thus, young children identify potential friends for them and their parents for what they know about existing relationships. This ability, the researchers write, is “essential for navigating the larger social landscape and developing new social and emotional relationships.”