CHICAGO, July 31 (Xinhua) -- Infants 17 months of age expect leaders, not others, to intervene when one member of their group transgresses against another, a study posted on the website of the University of Illinois (UI) on Monday showed.
The study involved 120 infants. In a series of experiments, the researchers used bear puppets to enact skits in front of infants who sat comfortably on a parent's lap. Some of the children watched scenarios involving a protagonist that two other bears treated as a leader, and some saw a protagonist that appeared to have no authority over the other two bears.
In all the scenarios, the protagonist presented the other bears with two toys for them to share, but one bear quickly grabbed both toys, leaving none for the other bear. Next, the protagonist either rectified this transgression by redistributing one of the toys from the wrongdoer bear to the victim bear, or the protagonist ignored the transgression by approaching each bear without redistributing a toy.
"Infants stared longer when the leader ignored the wrongdoing than when she rectified it," said UI psychology professor Renee Baillargeon, who led the research. "This suggests that infants expected the leader to intervene and right the wrong in her group, and were surprised when she took no such action."
The children also stared longer at the wrongdoer bear than they stared at the victim bear when the leader ignored the transgression, as if something about the wrongdoer would explain the leader's reluctance to correct her.
The infants did not appear to be surprised when a protagonist who was not a leader failed to redress the same wrongdoing.
In a third experiment, one of the bears announced that she did not want a toy and the other bear took both toys. The infants in this experiment stared longer when the leader intervened to make sure that each bear had one toy.
"It was as if the infants understood that in this case there was no transgression, so they viewed it as overbearing for the leader to redistribute one of the toys to a bear who had made it clear she didn't want one," said former UI graduate student Maayan Stavans.
The findings provide new evidence that infants can reason about leaders. "We knew from previous work that children this age have specific ideas about how followers will behave toward their leaders," Baillargeon said. "Now we see that they also have complementary expectations about how leaders will behave toward their followers."
The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
