We performed over 60 studies with babies, children, and adults to assess how they interpret interactions they observe among others. We found that even 1-year-olds understand when actors cooperate to achieve a common goal, when a group of individuals follow a leader, and when people exchange goods. In particular, babies are very much interested when someone gives an object to someone else, and even think that an accidental transfer of objects might have been intentional. Adults also remember better what happened when they see giving actions than when they see other interactions. However, and contrary to what had been thought before, we have found that babies and toddlers do not fully understand helping actions – they probably see them as as people acting together rather than one person is acting for the benefit of another. By 3 to 4 years of age, they recognize helping behaviour but still do not think that such actions reflect the internal traits (such as helpfullness, unselfishness) of the people who perform them. Rather, they think that such actions, just like acts of giving, are to be explained by the social relation between the parties.
These findings are important in light of the common idea that babies and young children choose their friends on the basis of the traits they attribute to others. We investigated this assumption directly by an iPad game we developed for this purpose. While adults and school-age children behaved the way the commonsense view expect them to do (they chose fast and benevolent partners for themselves), younger children did not, despite the fact that they also recognized who was fast and who helped. Such findings indicate that young children are less judgmental than adults about others and that the attribution of character traits on the basis of observation requires extensive socialization and/or formal schooling.
