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and 18- and 24-month-old toddlers shared their food with an experimenter who had not received any food during “snack time” (Dunfield et al., 2011). Toddlers 30 months of age willingly offered a favorite blanket or toy to comfort a dis- tressed experimenter (Brownell et al., 2009). However, toddlers’ propensity to help depends on the friendliness, helpfulness, and trustworthiness of the other person. Toddlers 21 months of age preferred to help people who shared a toy or showed a willingness to share in a previous interaction than to help those who did not (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2010). Do infants help others for selfish or altruistic reasons? Evolutionary theory suggests that toddlers may be naturally motivated to help others because help- ing aids species survival (Warneken, 2015). Indeed, toddlers appear to help others because they want to, not because they hope to gain approval or receive something in return. In fact, being rewarded for good behavior may actually deter infants from helping out in the future. For example, an experimenter dropped a pen that 20-month-old infants helped to pick up. Once the infants had helped, the experimenter gave them a material reward (a toy for play), a social reward (“Thank you!”), or no reward. Later, infants who received the material reward were less likely to help the same adult than were infants in the social reward and no reward conditions (Warneken & Tomasello, 2008). Additionally, toddlers may act prosocially out of sympathetic concern. Eigh- teen- and 25-month-olds were more likely to share their toy with a person who was seemingly “victimized” than with a person who was not (Vaish et al., 2009). CHECK YOUR UNDERSTANDING 7.19 1. How do researchers assess infants’ prosocial behaviors, such as helping and sharing? Moral Development and Aggression LEARNING OBJECTIVE 7.20  Evaluate features of morality and early forms of aggression, and the ways they change in infancy and toddlerhood. The study of moral development originated with Piaget’s (1932) and Kohlberg’s (1969) investigation of people’s reasoning about moral situations, a topic we review in depth in Chapter 10. Piaget and Kohlberg asked children and adults to reason about hypothetical stories that contained moral themes or dilemmas, and developed stage theories of moral development based on their findings. However, neither attended to moral development in the first years of life, leav- ing unanswered questions around the early origins of morality. Do infants and toddlers have a moral sense —that is, a tendency to “see certain actions and indi- viduals as right, good, and deserving of reward, and others as wrong, bad, and deserving of punishment” (Hamlin, 2013, p. 186)? Or, does a moral sense only develop after years of experience? Nativists (see Chapter 5) suggest that infants have core understandings around being helped or harmed in particular ways and situations (Hamlin, 2010; Hamlin & Stitch, 2020; Mikhail, 2011; Premack & Premack, 1994). If so, the rudimentary building blocks for later advanced forms of morality may be laid down in infancy (Hamlin, 2013). Notably, the notion that infants have even a naïve understanding of right and wrong is heatedly debated (Killen & Rizzo, 2014), and so keep in mind the immense distinction between the early seeds of morality and the sophisticated moral reasoning of children and adults. Moral Goodness Moral goodness refers to feelings of concern for others and attempts to help those in need. The empathetic response of infants to others’ distress offers evi- dence of moral goodness. In a historic study, newborns cried when they heard ✓

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moral goodness  Feelings of con- cern for others and attempts to help others in need, including empathetic responses to others in distress moral understanding and evaluation  Identifying and liking individuals who are cooperative, empathetic, or helpful, and disliking individuals who are uncooperative, unempathetic, or unhelpful helper-hinderer studies  Studies that assess infants’ moral understand- ing and evaluation by presenting infants with “helping” and “hurting” puppets (for example) and then test- ing whether infants behave differently toward the “helper” or “hinderer”

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