Professor Renee Baillargeon: Early Sociomoral Reasoning.

Investigators have recently begun to examine what expectations infants and toddlers possess about social interactions among individuals and what principles underlie these expectations. My collaborators and I have been focusing on three principles in particular: Reciprocity, Fairness, and Ingroup Loyalty. Most of our research examines children’s responses to third-party situations involving novel, arbitrary groups. Our results suggest two main conclusions. First, infants and toddlers generally expect interactions among individuals to unfold in accordance with the principles of Reciprocity, Fairness, and Ingroup Loyalty. Second, there are significant developments in the second year of life as infants learn how to integrate or rank-order different principles in conflict situations.