Infants¿ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study

Evaluating others¿ actions as praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental aspect of human nature. A seminal study published in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life, considerably earlier than previously thought (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). In this study, infants demonstrated a preference for a character (i.e., a shape with eyes) who helped, over one who hindered, another character who tried but failed to climb a hill. This study sparked a new line of inquiry into infants¿ social evaluations; however, numerous attempts to replicate the original findings yielded mixed results, with some reporting effects not reliably different from chance. These failed replications point to at least two possibilities: (1) the original study may have overestimated the true effect size of infants¿ preference for helpers, or (2) key methodological or contextual differences from the original study may have compromised the replication attempts. Here we present a pre-registered, closely coordinated, multi-laboratory, standardized study aimed at replicating the helping/hindering finding using a well-controlled video version of the hill show. We intended to (1) provide a precise estimate of the true effect size of infants¿ preference for helpers over hinderers, and (2) determine the degree to which infants¿ preferences are based on social features of the Helper/Hinderer scenarios. To achieve these objectives, we conducted a large-scale, collaborative, multi-site replication study of infants¿ preferences for helping characters, with a pre-registered methodological and analytical plan [preregistration will be posted to OSF after an ¿in principle acceptance¿ is received. Colombia is one of the countries in which we will collect data for this collaborative project. In Colombia a total of 16 infants between the ages of 5,5 and 10.5 months will participate in the study. The two groups of research participating in the study, one from the Universidad del Valle, Cali, and one from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, will collect the data from Colombia. Our multi-site replication approach provides crucial insights beyond those of the existing systematic reviews (Holvoet et al., 2016; Margoni & Surian, 2018). First, by using a consistent methodology across laboratories around the world, we are able to more precisely identify sources of variation in infants¿ social evaluations (e.g., age, geographic location) that go beyond variation in the stimuli and experimental procedure, since each lab in our study will follow the same protocol and use the same video stimuli. Second, this approach allows us to compare infants¿ preferences for characters across social and non-social contexts, enabling us to measure whether infants¿ preferences are driven by social features of the helping/hindering events versus non-social or perceptual aspects of the events. Finally, given that meta-analyses in psychology have been shown to report effect sizes approximately three times as large as preregistered multi-lab replication projects (e.g. due to publication bias or selective reporting), our approach will allow us to obtain a more accurate estimate of the true effect size of infants¿ preference for Helpers (Kvarven, Strømland, & Johannesson, 2020).