Project Overview

  • Status: Collecting data and recruiting new labs to collect data! You can sign your lab up for data collection here

The goal of this spin-off project of MB4 is to examine individual differences in infants’ early social evaluations across diverse cultural contexts. Specifically, this project aims to test the relation between infants’ preferences for prosocial characters (“helpers”) over antisocial characters (“hinderers”) and (1) caregiver prosocial characteristics, beliefs, expectations, and socialization practices; (2) the infants’ cultural context; (3) infants’ everyday prosocial behaviors. We take a multi-method approach, combining experimental, observational, and survey-based measures in a large sample of infants from labs across the world.

Labs who participate in the main MB4 data collection have the option of participating in this spin-off project in two ways: (1) by administering surveys to parents and/or (2) having families participate in a naturalistic joint book reading (JRB) task.

The surveys include: Parental justice sensitivity survey; Infant Prosocial Behaviour Parent Interview (asks about parents beliefs and expectations surrounding prosocial development); Parental reflectivity scale; Individualism/ collectivism scale; and demographic surveys. The JBR task is a 10 minute, semi-structured observational task in which caregivers are given a 9-page wordless picture book: 3 pages depict prosocial interactions; 3 pages depict antisocial interactions; and 3 pages depict neutral events. Parent language and behavior is then transcribed and coded (e.g. moral-relevant talk).

Leads