“I know who the bad guy is!” Infants map the word “bad” to hinderers, but not the word “good” to helpers

Introduction Though a wealth of research has found that young infants have the capacity to evaluate helping and hindering agents, it is nevertheless unclear whether these evaluations reflect mere social evaluations or more mature understanding of moral concepts. The present experiments probed the nature of infants' evaluations by testing whether they associate the morally-relevant words “good” and “bad” with helpers and hinderers. Methods In Experiment 1, 32 19-month-olds watched a live puppet show where a protagonist puppet is either helped or hindered by another puppet. Then, the infant was presented with the helper and hinderer puppets, and asked, “can you point to the good/bad guy?”. In Experiment 2, 42 20-month-olds watched a video recording of the ball show, then engaged in a preferential looking paradigm in which still images of the helper and hinderer were shown on the screen. An audio prompt then asked, “Where's the good/bad guy? Find the good/bad guy,” while an eye-tracker monitored infants' gaze. Results Experiment 1 revealed that whereas infants reliably mapped “bad” to the hinderer (24/31, p = 0.003), they showed relatively inconsistent mapping of the word "good" to the helper ( p = 0.09). Results from Experiment 2 paralleled and bolstered that of Experiment 1: infants looked significantly longer at the hinderer when hearing the "bad" prompt, but looked equally at both characters when hearing the "good" prompt. Discussion Together, these findings suggest that infants may associate the abstract moral word “bad” with hindering behavior prior to the second birthday, but the association between “good” and helping behavior may emerge later. This asymmetry provides further evidence for a negativity bias in social cognition.